Carol Oates Quotes

#1. When we lay together, she showed me her soul, and I showed her mine, and they were the same. As you can imagine, mine was battered and bruised, tarnished like ancient metal. She scrubbed it clean. I cannot deny my own soul any more than I can deny she held it in her hands for a time.

Carol Oates

#2. I think you've been sleeping on the job; the city isn't exactly paradise," she said caustically. "Every time you clap your hands, another person becoms a statistic.

Carol Oates

#3. Help me," I sobbed. "I beg you, help me." My eyes burned, but
no tears came. I had lost the basic human ability to weep. Human ... I
am no longer human. "Destroy me. Take pity and send me on my way.

Carol Oates

#4. Is this really about keeping me safe or about you not wanting to share your sandbox with the others?

Carol Oates

#5. Deep down under where his heart resided, strangled up in thorny vines of guilt, anger, fear and longing, there lay something deeper in him, something that he couldn't see but she could.

Carol Oates

#6. The demon blood inside me burned my soul to ashes long ago.
I am a monster who once dreamed he was a man. Never mistake
me again.

Carol Oates

#7. You have lived all these years and you're still a grumpy teenage boy. That must take effort.

Carol Oates

#8. There is an hour when you realize: Here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time

Carol Oates

#9. She looked like a grown-up, a calm, controlled grown-up, and she was glad for that one mercy. No one would be able to judge from her exterior that she was falling apart on the inside or that she didn't feel mature at all.

Carol Oates

#10. Sebastian tapped his index finger on the polished wood thoughtfully. Yes, it was a universal truth: some things once broken were broken forever - like trust. It might be patched up and smoothed over, but it would always be the thing that had once been shattered.

Carol Oates

#11. The temptation to take the next step hung in the air around them ... it was the apple: take one bite, and there was no going back.

Carol Oates