Joyce Carol Oates Memories Quotations

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.