Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

All that remains is was.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

What happens to the hole when the cheese is gone?

When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been.

And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.

It was a place without a single feature of the space-time matrix that he knew. It was a place where nothing yet had happened - an utter emptiness. There was neither light nor dark: there was nothing here but emptiness.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

The majority of the world is empty space. Empty space, empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people - it's all empty space. That's amazing!

Life has become the ideology of its own absence.

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

So much of my work has been about disappearing.

Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there in a mind-independent sense; it is part of what is given.

Death is the stone into which our oblivion hardens.

An empty shell. Those were the first words that sprang to mind. .... Something incredibly important - .. - had disappeared from Miu for good. Leaving behind not life, but its absence

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

And lo, between the sundawn and the sun His day's work and his night's work are undone: And lo, between the nightfall and the light, He is not, and none knoweth of such an one.

And all was black and still, and black and cold, and black and dead, and black.

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.

Emptiness has its solace in that there's nothing left to take.

Darkness does not age; nothing is always nothing

In the end, we all lose it. Remember that. In the end, we own nothing.