Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Every choice leads you somewhere, but it might not be where you truly want to be if the decision is based on someone else. It could lead to regrets and what-ifs, but that doesn't mean you wouldn't still have valuable experiences.

In my limited experience, you have to make your own decisions in life and experience things for yourself.

Now that I'm older, I understand that it's up to the individual to decide who they are or what they are.

So, I guess we are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.

I'd rather believe in my own choice and see it all go wrong than do something I'm not fully convinced of and later feel guilty about it.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

If I'd trusted myself and listened to myself all the times that I ignored myself, I would have been fine. But everyone has to learn their lesson, and now I've got it.

We do things in our past that we need to do at the time.

Every day I have many choices to make about who I want to be.

I never regret anything. Because every little detail of your life is what made you into who you are in the end.

I decided I was sick of trying to figure out what everybody else wanted, and I should just decide what I want, and be honest, and not spend all my time guessing.

It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.

I never had the chance to consider what or how I wanted to be.

Sooner or later we've all got to confront the reality that we have got to come to understand who we are and what we're doing, and the extent to which we are guided or manipulated by forces that are beyond our control.

I can't say that dropping out of school at 16 to join the Marines was my best idea. On the other hand, maybe it was. Who knows?

I know what I need. I don't want people to tell me what I need.

With aging, you earn the right to be loyal to yourself.

I think what my 42 years of life has given me is just how important it is to live your own life.

Who do you want to be: the radical man who can make a choice in one second, or the man who never takes decisions? That's the question: who's the best? Actually, there is no best.

I used to just let people tell me what to do. I didn't really have a mind of my own, and I couldn't really say yes or no to things because I didn't really know what I wanted, but now I feel really confident in the fact that I can really be distinctive on what I want and how I want to do things.

It's my life, it's up to me what I want to do with it. And I'm realizing that.

I chose to go to CAA. I think me becoming my own man is going to make it easier, honestly.

Many of us don’t realize that we have a choice about which aspect of ourselves we will use as the foundation upon which we build our lives.

In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the difference between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are; its the legroom for the lies you'll tell yourself in the future.

The fact is that this conversation is going on at every level at every age, we're all going, "God, what a jerk I've been," "How could I have married that guy?" or "How could I have done this or that?" With time, this is the gift of being older, that you get to look back and say, "It wasn't all about them."