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Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

"Boxing has become America's tragic theater."
Sports

"Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light."

"Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate."

"If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?"

"To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up."

"Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost."

"The third man in the ring makes boxing possible."

"When poets write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane."

"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."

"Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance."

"The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency."

"What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me."

"In love there are things - bodies and words."
Love

"We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language."

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

"The worst cynicism: a belief in luck."

"It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim."

"Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity."

"When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life."

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