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"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."
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"A satirist that criticizes religion is seen as a satanist."

"Most priests wish they were as righteous as they seem to most members of their congregations."

"Only the Prince of Peace gives peace."

"There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't."

"The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes."

"Religion is a cultural relic inherited from ancient civilizations that doctrinal influence persists globally in modern times. Religious people rely upon their notional belief in the primal innocence of human beings in order to support the abstract supposition of inherently benevolent God guiding human souls."

"Unlike most other world religions, Buddhism has never been too rigid in its structure."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

"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."

"I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life."

"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."

"But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen."

"I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes."

"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."

"I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it."
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