Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Childhood

Quotes about: Childhood

• Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Dream, Omnipotence, Childhood

• I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Country, Dream, New York

  Off the Page with Carole Burns, www.washingtonpost.com. May 9, 2006.

• Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Imagination, Childhood, Want

  Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.94, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Children, Thinking, Animal

• We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Character, Roots, Childhood

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