"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..."
- Joyce Carol Oates
"The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it..."
"The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!"
"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."
"For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom."
"It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!"
"It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the ..."
"Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudd..."
"I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth."