Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

In death, lie. In living, cry. Carry me home to remember to be remembered.

The elegy does the work of mourning; it allows us to experience mortality. It turns loss into remembrance, and it delivers an inheritance.

At death our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us and are found out, or depart farther from us and are forgotten. Friends are as often brought nearer together as separated by death.

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

Only the forgotten are truly dead.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

A remembrance can mean nothing to the one remembered; it can only remind the ones left behind how little they did while you were still alive.

I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place.

Just because someone's dead doesn't mean it's over. My grandfather died more than 25 years ago, but I still think of him a lot and smell his smell.

My only rule: I never photographed the face of the dead, ever, out of respect for the families.

Perhaps it's more merciful to forget the dead instead of remembering them.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

I'm sure it's the same whether you lost your parent at 25 or 45. When they die, the responsibility to do right by them and honor them becomes more important to you, because they're not here to tell you, 'Hey man, don't be doing that,' or, 'Yeah, you're making me proud, or you're not.'

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

The dead are never far from us. They're in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.

How can the dead be truly dead when they still live in the souls of those who are left behind?

What do people fear most about death? I asked the reb. "Fear?" he thought for a moment. 'Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?" That's big. "Yes. But there's something else." What else? He leaned forward. "Being forgotten," he whispered.

I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?" "And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

The dead have a presence.