Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the unspoken emotions and tensions within a family, suggesting that communication is often overshadowed by superficial noise.
Joyce Carol Oates points out that within family dynamics, there are significant emotions and truths that remain unexpressed, and it is this silent communication that we are attuned to. However, the everyday sounds and distractions of family life often serve to mask these deeper feelings, making it difficult to truly listen and understand each other.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of family connections, one might say, 'As Joyce Carol Oates observes, in a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for.'
Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
On the good days, my mother would haul out the ukulele and we'd sit around the kitchen table - it was a cardboard table with a linoleum top - and sing.
It is from God that parents receive their children, and it is to God that they should lead them.
Our parents deserve our honor and respect for giving us life itself. Beyond this they almost always made countless sacrifices as they cared for and nurtured us through our infancy and childhood, provided us with the necessities of life, and nursed us through physical illnesses and the emotional stresses of growing up.
I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals.
Luckily, my father and my mother liked us to talk, so they encouraged us to talk, so that the girls in my house, they're all very powerful speakers and powerful agents of their own will, as is my brother.
When mom and dad went to war the only prisoners they took were the children
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