Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

-tomorrow is our permanent address and there they’ll scarcely find us(if they do, we’ll move away still further:into now

As people used to be wrong about the motion of the sun, so they are still wrong about the motion of the future. The future stands still, it is we who move in infinite space.

The real message of the Dance opens up the vistas of life to all who have the urge to express beauty with no other instrument than their own bodies, with no apparatus and no dependence on anything other than space.

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.

It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.

I don't know exactly where my life will lead. Adventure and the unknown has always been appealing to me.

Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?

The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.

To know is to exist; to exist is to be involved, to move about, to see the world with my own eyes.

Even while the Earth sleeps we travel.

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, "look at me move.

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

One of the most moral acts is to create a space in which life can move forward.

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward.

Can you move on from something when you're not sure what it is you're moving on from?

Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain.

Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence.... The two propositions: "The earth turns round" and "it is more convenient to suppose the earth turns round" have the same meaning; there is nothing more in the one than in the other.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

The past is closed and limited; the future is open and free.

Who you really are, your True Nature, is no more tied to the kind of person you've been than the wind is tied to the skies through which it moves. Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it than a picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone. You have a destination far beyond where you find yourself standing today.

When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been.

When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.

And while the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it's seems, It would be easier sometimes to change the past.

For something that is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way or a definite path; but not for anything that is moving and living.