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Joyce Carol Oates Quotes about Memories

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What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

Joyce Carol Oates
Memories, Mean, Doe

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Joyce Carol Oates
Memories, Blood, Ancestry

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

Joyce Carol Oates
Memories, Writing, Ghost

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

Joyce Carol Oates
Memories, Remember You, Remembers You
Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories”, p.224, Zondervan

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Joyce Carol Oates
Memories, Eye, Sight

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

Joyce Carol Oates
Family, Memories, Kitchen
Joyce Carol Oates (2001). “We Were the Mulvaneys”, p.18, Penguin

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

Joyce Carol Oates
Memories, Typical, Degrees

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
Memories, Tears, Fool
Joyce Carol Oates (2001). “We Were the Mulvaneys”, p.129, Penguin

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