A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?
That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
The real tragedy is that we're all human beings, and human beings have a sense of dignity. Any domination by one human over another leads to a loss of some part of his dignity. Is one's dignity that big it can be crumbled away like that?
As far as extra dimensions are concerned, very tiny extra dimensions wouldn't be perceived in everyday life, just as atoms aren't: we see many atoms together but we don't see atoms individually.
Haemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your haemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity.
It's appalling that there have to be movements organized to give human beings the right to be human beings in the eyes of other human beings.
Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and love one another more if they would admit to one another how lonely they were, how sad they were in their tormented, anxious longings and feeble hopes.
Life is not made of atoms,it is merely built out of them. What life is actually 'made of' is cycles of cause and effect, loops of causal flow. These phenomenon are just as real as atoms - perhaps even more real. If anything, the entire universe is actually made from events, of which atoms are merely some of the consequences.
There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all human beings are alike, and that all are different. On those two facts all human wisdom is founded.
Relationship between human beings is based on the image-forming, defensive mechanism. In our relationships each of us builds an image about the other, and these two images have relationship, not the human beings themselves.
I never felt like that in my life. I didn't know human beings played these instruments. I heard them in Chicago and Louisville and St. Louis all my life, you know? But I didn't know human beings played them, you know? So the next day I went to Coontz Junior High School and I started on sousaphone, tuba, B-flat baritone, E-flat alto, French horn, trombone.
Human beings have a bunch of different dimensions, so even if you're playing someone who you think maybe the audience might not like, might not be going for, you still have to give them the dimensions to make them a real human, otherwise there's no point.
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.
I said the screen will kill the reader, and it has: the movie screen in the beginning, the television screen, and now the coup de grace, the computer screen.
(Human) beings, in Pagan times would kind of like, listen to the stories and, they could kind of, identify - . They were, like, bigger than them and more successful than them or more beautiful, but they had these human fallibilities. Which is like celebrities now. It's like, 'oh, she's in rehab. Oh, she's unfaithful. Oh, they're divorced. Oh, she's anorexic. Oh, he's had a nose job.' You know, whatever it might be.
Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics, then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn't do anything that people are doing, and we don't really see any evidence that this is not the case.
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