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"The worst cynicism a belief in luck."
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"The world will see true peace when there are no boundaries of religion and the religion of all will be pure unconditional love."
"The Bible warns [parents] against extremes in dealing with our adult children. It tells us to avoid trying to control [them] once they become adults. When children become independent, a major transition takes place: They are no longer under our authority."
"This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. (...) Forever I shall be a stranger to myself."
"I am engaged in spiritual warfare every day. I must never let down my guard-I must keep armed."
"Simplicity is, as simple as you make it."
"Who gave fire permission to burn?"
"Thinking doesn't pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you."
"But if I feel, may I never express? "Never! declared Reason.I groaned under her bitter sternness. Never - never - oh, hard word! This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope; she could not rest unless I were altogether crushed, cowed, broken-in, and broken down. According to her, I was born only to work for a piece of bread, to await the pains of death, and steadily through all life to despond. Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination - her soft, bright foe, our sweet Help, our divine Hope."
"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end."
"...because wherever else the future leads, it leads ultimately to death, the end that is present in my beginning and in yours."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
"A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting."
"How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray-here? Is it possible that he won't be coming home with me in another day or two, as we'd planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It's like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it."
"He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul."
"You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal."
"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."
"The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!"
"When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover."
"This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone."
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