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"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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Exlpore more Observation quotes

"The bowl is warmer than the soup."

"While humans play God, dogs learn from their masters."

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines."

"No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer."

"I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."

"That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness."

"Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business."

"Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes, perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness."

"If you love something so much let it go. If it comes back it was meant to be, if it doesn't it never was."

"In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

"It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim."

"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."

"How exhausted I am suddenly!-though this has been Ray's best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling-almost-exhilarated."

"A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting."

"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."

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