Yeats Meet Oates: An Author Quote Mashup – @Signature Reads

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As a bonus, below you’ll also find The Cranberries’s musical tribute to Yeats circa 1994; by dazzling coincidence, at that time Oates would have been hard at work on her novel called Zombie.

W.B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Joyce Carol Oates, I Am No One You Know: Stories, 2004
“I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.”

W.B. Yeats, “If I Were Four-and-Twenty,” printed in Irish Statesman, 1919
“One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: ‘Hammer your thoughts into unity.’ For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence.”

Joyce Carol Oates, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, 1990
“My self is all to me. I don’t have any need of you.”

W.B. Yeats, “The Pity of Love,” 1893
“A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love”

Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story, 2011
“There is an hour, a minute — you will remember it forever — when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don’t know — can’t know — that it is the first of a series of ‘wrongful’ events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.”

W.B. Yeats, “The Sorrow of Love,” 1893
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man’s image and his cry.

Joyce Carol Oates, Faithless: Tales of Transgression, 2001
“A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?”

W.B. Yeats, “No Second Troy,” 1916
“Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?”

Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, 1993
“The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”

W.B. Yeats, “The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water,” 1903
“I heard the old, old men say,
‘Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.’”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY0BzH77Q1I?feature=oembed&w=500&h=375