“ Maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just just the next just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next maybe all there is… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to outlive them—for to be a daughter without p… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making th… Joyce Carol Oates
“ I could wish that I had recourse to the Prince of Darkness & his quick ways of revenge; Joyce Carol Oates
“ I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space—who else? & that night in my sand-colored 1987 Ford van with the American flag decal covering the rear window cruising Cedar Street, Da… Joyce Carol Oates
“ But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me. Joyce Carol Oates
“ At least, Mother said, that's the story Aunt Esther tells. What do you mean? I asked. Isn't it true? Stories are never 'true', Mother said. But they may, almost by accident, contain 'truth'. Sometimes… Joyce Carol Oates
“ A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer. Joyce Carol Oates
“ A familiar story, Marya instructs herself—a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never collapse, only just fade gradually away? Joyce Carol Oates
“ There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete. Joyce Carol Oates
