Quotes from We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates ·  454 pages

Rating: (83.6K votes)


“In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys



“Marianne laughed. But you can’t disappoint me! I don’t love you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“P.J. said, "That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know."
"Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it."
"Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night--but even as you recall it, it begins to fade.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Oh, it’s a terrible, cruel thing—first you’re young, and that takes up such a long time you think it’s forever, then suddenly you’re not young, and you never get used to it—and, oh dear, there’s just the one way out.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“During these mad dashes to the wall phone in the kitchen she hadn't time to fall but with fantastical grace and dexterity wrenched herself upright in midfall and continued running (dogs whimpering, yapping hysterically in her wake, cats scattering wide-eyed and plume-tailed) before the telephone ceased it's querulous ringing--though frequently she was greeted with nothing more than a derisive dial tone, in any case.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys



“It simply fell from him, like a heavy overcoat he'd shrugged off, no longer needing its warmth or bulk to protect him.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Thinking of such things like they’d happened years ago already and not just a few weeks back. For once life begins to accelerate it goes faster and faster.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Love you in that cheerleader’s costume. Last Friday. You didn’t see me I guess. But I was there.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn’t quite enough.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys



“Della Rae was a pig and she was smashed out of her skull and you didn’t want to think about it,”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“the United States government was at the mercy of special-interest groups, lobbies like the National Rifle Association and the American Medical Association, the automobile and oil industries, every kind of defense manufacturer, how could democracy be served?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“if she petted or fed one animal in the presence of others, she must pet and feed them all. It was what Jesus would have done had He lived intimately with animals.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“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, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts. Particularly if it hurts.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys



“What had they been talking about?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“No noose is good noose’—as the condemned man said on the scaffold.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“Because nothing between human beings isn’t uncomplicated and there’s no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“How happy she was, how elated!”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“A dog’s life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys



“(always, you want to impress them: men of authority)”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


“It was Corinne’s secret belief that her daughter was a far finer person than she was herself, a riddle put to her by God. I must become the mother deserving of such a daughter—is that it?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, quote from We Were the Mulvaneys


About the author

Joyce Carol Oates
Born place: in Lockport, New York, The United States
Born date June 16, 1938
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Popular quotes

“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton, quote from Orthodoxy


“For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life?”
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“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
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“Not one fuckin’ thing gentlemanly about protecting what’s yours. Looks like you’re gonna lose it, you do everything you can to stop that from happening.” Max looked back to Niles. “And you didn’t do that. She was a week away from me, she walked into a room I was in holdin’ another man’s hand, I’d lose my fuckin’ mind. Not at her. Wonderin’ where I lost my way and I’d talk to her about how to find my way back.”
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"And in the meantime?"
"Looks like you're naked."
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