The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.
Joyce Carol OatesThere is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.
Joyce Carol Oates'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.
Joyce Carol Oates