“ Why you can't trust women. Even young girls. Can't know what the fuck they are thinking, can't know what they are feeling, can't know how they will surprise you except to know it won't be a surprise y… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Why is it when I'm inside this stone house I've come to love I can't remember what it looks like from the outside. And when I'm outside I can't remember what it looks like on the inside.Why is it I ke… Joyce Carol Oates
“ When he was three years old Jackie ran into the house crying. I asked, What's happened? What's wrong?He showed me his bleeding hand - the palm of his hand had been scraped.How did you do that? It isn'… Joyce Carol Oates
“ What was most striking about the portrait of Jane, Countess of Harrington was the aura of confidence it exuded – not merely the figure of the beautifully composed young noblewoman, her slender face se… Joyce Carol Oates
“ What is destiny—a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’—the Americans understand this admonition, deep in their killer-souls. Joyce Carol Oates
“ The person you love best, you share the world with. When that person's gone the world remains but it isn't the same thing, it's at a distance. Joyce Carol Oates
“ The hat-check girl wore her hair in a schoolgirl pageboy so you were meant to think of Dorothy Collins – all innocence, wide-eyed and breathless – but this was mock-innocent and she knew her business,… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Suicide is in fact a consoling thought. Suicide is the secret door by which you can exit the world at any time—it’s wholly up to you. For who can prevent you, if suicide is truly your wish? Who has th… Joyce Carol Oates
“ She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband alive in her memory—elusive, teasing. Joyce Carol Oates
“ She had paid for these mistakes. (Had she?) But still, you are never fully acquitted of any mistake that involves another, and so the Intern had not been fully acquitted of her mistakes, and her shame… Joyce Carol Oates
“ REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city) Joyce Carol Oates
“ Mrs. Erskine struck him as fierce and plain and haughty as one of those straight-backed red-haired girl-women in certain of the watercolors of Winslow Homer. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Josiah feel that, for a moment, he’d been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to care too mu… Joyce Carol Oates
“ I’d like to be your friend—but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me. Joyce Carol Oates
“ It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn’t quite enough. Joyce Carol Oates
“ In her behavior Mrs. S——was youthful and loud-talking which made us uneasy, for children are not comfortable when adults behave as if they are not adults. Often it seemed that Mrs. S——was winking at u… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us. Joyce Carol Oates
