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"Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity."
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"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"

"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."

"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."

"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."

"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"

"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."

"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."

"What you are seeking is yourself."

"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."

"The world is full of vanities."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."

"Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are."

"Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely-perhaps never-furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you've ruined both our lives."

"Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind."

"I feel very transparent in myself. I'm more of an observer. I'm interested in what's going on. I'm not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people - but when I'm not with them I don't have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water."

"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."

"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 coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!"

"The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children's books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she'd been a little girl. There hadn't been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes."
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