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"He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life."
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"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
"Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him."
"When a man's girlfriend's parents ask him what it is that he does for a living: they're not really concerned about him, they're concerned about their daughter's tummy."
"The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there's a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under."
"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business con."
"The greater ignorance towards a country is not ignoring what its politicians have to say, it is ignoring what the inmates in its prisons have to say."
"It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact."
"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."
"Electing a bigot enables further bigotry."
"Civilization is the commercialization of survival."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
"The demon blood inside me burned my soul to ashes long ago.I am a monster who once dreamed he was a man. Never mistakeme again."
"There are some secrets so toxic you can't share. Especially if you love who it is you'd have to share with."
"You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source."
"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable."
"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
"Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers-their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges-But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight."
"This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash."
"It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed-to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!"
"The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way."
"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."
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