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"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."
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"Cultural heritage define the uniqueness of individuals. Appreciate cultural diversity."
"Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy."
"A single recipe holds countless stories."
"The part of the tradition that I knew best was mostly written (or rewritten for children) in England and northern Europe. The principal characters were men. If the story was heroic, the hero was a white man; most dark-skinned people were inferior or evil. If there was a woman in the story, she was a passive object of desire and rescue (a beautiful blond princess); active women (dark, witches) usually caused destruction or tragedy. Anyway, the stories weren't about the women. They were about men, what men did, and what was important to men."
"Those who mouth your sacred words with an accent you deem wrong annoy you more than those speaking something you cannot understand."
"Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along."
"On a world where a common table implement is a little device with which you crack the ice that has formed on your drink between drafts, hot beer is a thing you come to appreciate."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
"Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart."
"The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people."
"Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose."
"Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest."
"Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them."
"There are some secrets so toxic you can't share. Especially if you love who it is you'd have to share with."
"Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions."
"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."
"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."
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