A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
Related Quotes
Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.
Freedom is but the possibility of a various and indefinite activity; while government, or the exercise of dominion, is a single, yet real activity. The longing for freedom, therefore, is at first only too frequently suggested by the deep-felt consciousness of its absence.
I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman.
We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.
Suicide does not end the chances of life getting worse. Suicide eliminates the possibility of it ever getting better.
The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.
While his history of depression is compatible with suicide... and the location and direction of the stab wounds are consistent with self-infliction, several aspects of the circumstances (as they are known at this time) are atypical of suicide and raise the possibility of homicide.
Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.
Iran can recruit hundreds of suicide bombers a day. Suicide is an invincible weapon. Suicide bombers in this land showed us the way, and they enlighten our future.
The only justification for writing a novel is that it should be wonderful. Adequate is inadequate.
It was always intriguing that flies had two peaks of activity, in the morning and evening, with a siesta during the day and not very much activity at night. There are several ways to explain that, but one possibility was that there were two clocks running - one governing the morning peak and one governing the evening peak.
The animal is one with its life activity. It does not distinguish the activity from itself. It is its activity. But man makes hislife activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has a conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he is completely identified.
I had three choices: to conform to my own beliefs, which meant death; complete silence, which meant another kind of death; to pay a tribute, a bribe. I chose the third solution by writing The Long Winter.
They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.
Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide.
You know, people are dying, not only the 22 suicides a day which is inconceivable when you hear that. When I first heard that I said, no you mean a month. I mean, can you imagine a day, 22 suicides a day? A lot of the suicide is people can't get to see doctors, a lot of it because the waits are so long. That's an administrative problem.
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