Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can.

Photographing expresses human desire to preserve passing time. It is like a man struggling with time that elapses, and in general - a desire to preserve oneself.

Only fools need suffer to learn.

In comedy, you see yourself as a newcomer and then you realize you've been doing it for 18, 20 years, which is ridiculous.

And if I say to you that I am glad of everything we have done together, and sorry that we will not be here together in forty years, laughing at a faded photo of you impersonating a lion, it having withered well, you less so, as we stand fabulously old, in a city that understands what spirit it takes to be old, to be beautiful, to be much looked at, to be itself, to be never quite caught, to have a past, to be content, to have seen much, to have remained, to have continued...

Our past has gone into history.

What, start at this! when sixty years have spread. Their grey experience o'er thy hoary head? Is this the all observing age could gain? Or hast thou known the world so long in vain?

Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever?

It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

There is no need for the writer to eat a whole sheep to be able to tell you what mutton tastes like. It is enough if he eats a cutlet. But he should do that.

We need only reflect on what has been prov'd at large, that we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt causes and effects, and that 'tis only by our experience of their constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this relation.

I saw the sunset forty-four times!

The older I get, the more I appreciate what came before.

A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.

Experience teacheth that resolution is a sole help in need.

You need to see things, REALLY see them, feel them, live them, so you know what’s big and what’s little, what matters and what to put aside.

The value of action is that we make mistakes; mistakes show us what we need to learn.

Time has passed through me and become a song.

I think you need the failures to get the success. You learn more from that.

Maybe it's just getting older, but I don't want to miss things.

I don't need faith. I have experience.

Every historical moment needs the stories to be told about it.

Never say [to younger people] "that was before your time," because the last full moon was before their time!

I use the word inquiry as synonymous with The Work...Inquiry is a way to end confusion and to experience internal peace, even in a world of apparent chaos. Above all else, inquiry is about realizing that all the answers we ever need are always available inside us.

As you get older and you realize you really don't know as much as you think you know, you listen more. Because then you think, now I need to be more receptive to the things I don't know. That's how you learn.