Joyce Carol Oates Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. . . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

2. And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

3. For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain? We Were the Mulvaneys

4. In love there are two things - bodies and words.

5. The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

6. Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life

7. A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope? Faithless: Tales of Transgression

8. If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

9. It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

10. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

11. The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole. Mudwoman

12. 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. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang