A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty.

Joyce Carol Oates

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Almost Beautifully Beauty Boldly Collection Debut Entails Exploration Human Human Relations Imagined Inventive Nature Paradise Poignant Relations Sensuous Stories Times Transience Vividly Written

Quote Author

Joyce Carol Oates
American - Writer
Born: June 16, 1938

The immersive stories of This Is Paradise are a lithe blend of formal invention and traditional narrative pleasures. As such they reflect Kristiana Kahakauwila's intimate but expansive vision of a Hawai'i forged from the collisions of past and present, here and there. Her protagonists are as richly distinctive as the pidgin they speak, and yet each struggles profoundly with identity-that negotiation between ourselves and the world, which is at once Hawaiian, American, universally and compellingly human.

Peter Ho Davies

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

Jean Baudrillard

Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.

Orson Welles

For me, Iran was paradise, and I believe it's a paradise still, but only if you don't have political problems. If you have a political problem, paradise turns into hell.

Golshifteh Farahani

I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise--a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames--but still a paradise.

Vladimir Nabokov

I was born in New Orleans, but I grew up in Hawaii. That was a paradise. That's a paradise I keep inside of me all the time. It's funny, I don't really write too much in poetry about Hawaii, but I published a book of stories a couple of years ago.

Barbara Hamby

The child in each of us Knows paradise. Paradise is home. Home as it was Or home as it should have been. Paradise is one's own place, One's own people, One's own world, Knowing and known, Perhaps even Loving and loved. Yet every child Is cast from paradise- Into growth and new community, Into vast, ongoing Change.

Octavia Butler

We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

If all stories are fiction, fiction can be true -- not in detail or fact, but in some transformed version of feeling. If there is a memory of paradise, paradise can exist, in some other place or country dimensionally reminiscent of our own. The sad stories live there too, but in that country, we know what they mean and why they happened. We make our way back from them, finding the way through a bountiful wilderness we begin to understand. Years are nothing: Story conquers all distance.

Jayne Anne Phillips

We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us. What was ordained for us has been changed; it is not said that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise.

Franz Kafka

Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

Charles Baxter

Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.

Frederick Buechner

We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed.

Franz Kafka

Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.

Padgett Powell

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.

Franz Kafka

Refuse to seek for the road to paradise, because every beautiful place is already a paradise!