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"When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover."
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Exlpore more Loss quotes
"When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed."
"When a dreamer loses his lover, his dream profits. (Unless, of course, the lover was the dreamer's dream.)"
"It's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle."
"If you haven't already, you will lose someone you can't live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and you never completely get over the loss of a deeply beloved person. But this is also good news. The person lives forever, in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through, and you learn to dance with the banged-up heart."
"Fear no more as long as her memory surrounds you like a ghost, cry no more as long as she weeps for you like a willow."
"When I say I'm going to forget you I know it's impossible to forget someone I once knew. What I want is to erase you from my thoughts and purge you from my memories. I'm saying it's what I wish for, not what is or could ever be."
"We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it."
"May be you are gone,but that doesn't make me come back."
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."
"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."
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