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Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis.

— Joyce Carol Oates

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Poetry

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

All Joyce Carol Oates quotes →

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joyce Carol Oates (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.