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"We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it."
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"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."

"You do not need a boyfriend or a girlfriend to write an emotional poet, because poetry is beyond hooks and holes."

"The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode."

"Music heals all forms of misery."

"The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

"The demon blood inside me burned my soul to ashes long ago.I am a monster who once dreamed he was a man. Never mistakeme again."

"There are some secrets so toxic you can't share. Especially if you love who it is you'd have to share with."

"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."

"The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable."

"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."

"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."

"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 relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way."

"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."

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