A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

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Ghosts Like Memories Much Psychological Sense Something Unresolved Writing

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

I've always been attracted to the idea of ghosts being memories frozen in time, that a psychological haunting can be just as terrifying as a supernatural one.

Ed Gass-Donnelly

Much like photographs, I also love the idea that ghosts are memories frozen in time. We can be haunted by both just as horrifically. One really becomes a metaphor for the other.

Ed Gass-Donnelly

(What are your ghosts like?) (They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.) (This is also where my ghosts reside.) (You have ghosts?) (Of course I have ghosts.) (But you are a child.) (I am not a child.) (But you have not known love.) (These are my ghosts, the spaces amid love.)

Jonathan Safran Foer

Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.

Hannah Kent

Movies by Carlos Saura and others had ghosts, memories from the past, that they used to make a political point. Things you couldn't talk about openly, you could speak of through ghosts.

Juan Antonio Bayona

I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.

Kate Atkinson

If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts.

Adam Duritz

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.

Mark Haddon

We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.

Philip K. Dick

Memories can bring comfort to the old and infirm, but memories can also be implacable foes, a malicious army of temporal ghosts forever pillaging the long-sought-after peace of our twilight years.

Rick Yancey

I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. [...] The other problem I have is fear of writing. The act of writing puts you in confrontation with yourself, which is why I think writers assiduously avoid writing. [...] Not writing is more of a psychological problem than a writing problem. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. [...] It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years. It's much more relaxing actually to work.

Fran Lebowitz

Smell can conjure up memories for me stronger than any other sense. Especially childhood memories. Perhaps because you were that much shorter and therefore closer to the ground and its smells.

Lilli Palmer

My story reflexes come less from fantasy or horror than from the darker sort of psychological thriller - not as plot-driven as most, rather more mood-driven. My interest in the supernatural is a complication - though I am less interested in ghosts than in people who see ghosts.

Graham Joyce

Anyone who feels that they're in some way plugged into a meaningful, cosmic system is given a greater psychological balance as a result-whether or not they believe it contains a god-like figure at the control panels. Lots of people have this beneficial sense of being plugged into something bigger, even if they're not religious in the going-to-church-regularly sense.

Robin Skynner

Ghosts don't haunt people--their memories do.

Alexandra Bracken

I attended the public schools.And I have happy memories and strong memories of those days and good memories of the good sense and the decency of my friends and my neighbors.

Samuel Alito

A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

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