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"Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding."
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"Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street."
"The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child."
"No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time."
"All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
"A wise woman protects her kids. A wiser woman hangs out with police officers, retired FBI agents and private investigators."
"Fear is the mother of morality."
"He who loses his mother loses a pure soul who blesses and guards him constantly."
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."
"The city reeked of death, and the savages that resided within its imposing starkness existed in fear of their lives. They had been shocked by the recent bloody Whitechapel murders, as if starvation, disease, moral degradation, and perpetual smog drowning all color in gray wasn't enough to bring home the pathetic reality of their miserable existence. The police were no nearer to capturing the monster that lurked in the crevices, and London seemed stiller in the dark, the streets devoid of hope."
"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."
"Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning."
"The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!"
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