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"Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art."
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"Thought, if I may put it, is the man behind the possession, appearance, things we like, things we hate and the very epitome of life."

"Your subconscious mind is the universal mind with a universal consciousness."

"Absolute is infinite so there is no absolute truth. There is truth that you can see in infinite ways and make your own."

"Every aspect of your life will be enlivened when you start to think and communicate with your heart and mind in cohesive coordinated harmony."

"Think about yourself because no one has time to think about you. Everyone is busy thinking about themselves."

"I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known."

"I don't know who you are or where you are, but I know your deep driving desires. I am writing to you to make your life a little easier and better."

"There are two kinds of people:those who learned to love and those who didn't."

"Any education that doesn't allow you to think freely is not an education but a prison."

"I came to this world to bloom and spread my love to fill the world with happiness."
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'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life."

"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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