“ I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end. Joyce Carol Oates
“ I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell a… Joyce Carol Oates
“ How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb. Joyce Carol Oates
“ He was sentimental about women. It infuriated him that any man, let alone a minister, could behave so selfishly on his honeymoon. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Considered in the abstract the boxing ring is an altar of sorts, one of those legendary spaces where the laws of a nation are suspended: inside the ropes, during an officially regulated three-minute r… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Civilization is faces, appearances: when these collapse, civilization collapses as well. Joyce Carol Oates
“ Powerful blow from a practiced boxer can stop an opponent’s heart, it is said. It’s a cruel blow but it can be thrown easily if you have the strength and the skill and the will to do such lethal hurt,… Joyce Carol Oates
“ It might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events. Joyce Carol Oates
“ You may put this in your interview, Miss Fife, that Robert Frost believes in civilization—which is to say the Caucasian civilization. But, Joyce Carol Oates
“ Yet The Falls exerted its malevolent spell, that never weakened. If you grew up in the Niagara region, you knew. Adolescence was the dangerous time. Most Niagara natives kept their distance from The F… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and… Joyce Carol Oates
“ VERY ODD, HOWEVER, Annabel was beginning to feel, how the stranger continued to hold the hand-sickle, at his side; now he’d turned to her, seeing her, yet without an air of surprise, as if he’d known… Joyce Carol Oates
“ To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not. Joyce Carol Oates
“ There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so ex… Joyce Carol Oates
“ The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future. Joyce Carol Oates
“ She was standing with her thin arms lifted in a pose of crucifixion as the white satin gown with its myriad pearl buttons, tucks and pleats and ingenious lace trim, was fitted onto her like an exquisi… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Now the broken-off parts of her life, the fragments, bits, puzzle pieces, began to fall into place, to assemble themselves, as invariably they do once we are under the enchantment of Death. Joyce Carol Oates
“ No American sport or activity has been so consistently and so passionately under attack as boxing, for moral as we'll as other reasons. And no American sport evokes so ambivalent a response in its def… Joyce Carol Oates
“ Much of the time he lay part-dressed on his bed, sipping gin, and thinking, and thinking, - though what it was, of which he thought, he seemed not to know. Joyce Carol Oates
