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"Deep down under where his heart resided, strangled up in thorny vines of guilt, anger, fear and longing, there lay something deeper in him, something that he couldn't see but she could."
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"My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free."

"We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember."

"Negative thoughts about ourselves steals our energy."

"Nostalgia is your brain's way of photoshopping the blemishes of your past."

"A poor but confident man is as hard to find as a rich but shy man."

"Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious."

"I have found that as your wisdom and maturity develop, the number of other people you blame for your own circumstances shrinks."

"A person with a victim complex is unable to set goals and achieve them independently."

"It is not until you find yourself lost in the silence that you will learn to let go because everyone has let go of you."

"Often people that tell others they are "extremely polite" when the situation calls for tact and bluntness are not actually polite people. Instead, they hide behind the word "polite" because they have low self esteem or hidden agendas. Sadly, they impolitely confuse the hell out of everyone, send mixed signals, which then makes people question their sanity and motives."
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."

"This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone."

"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."

"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."

"Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity."

"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."

"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."

"I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart."

"As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise."
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