Joyce Carol Oates

A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#business

To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#age

For isn't the artist by nature a revolutionary? ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#nature

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#nature

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#family #innocence #family

... the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#change

No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#change

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#courage

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#politics #art

A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#change