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"This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone."
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"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"

"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."

"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."

"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."

"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"

"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."

"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."

"What you are seeking is yourself."

"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."

"The world is full of vanities."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."

"Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are."

"Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"Art serves a purpose. It expands our horizons, frees our minds, and opens us up to new experiences. It opens the imagination. All these great discoveries of our time - without the desire to reach beyond our boundaries, we would be forever stagnant. The folly is in closing one's eyes and not recognizing it."

"When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice."
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