A Fair Maiden Quotes

“To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“Since thirteen, she’d been preparing. She wasn’t beautiful like these Bayhead Harbor girls, but it was surprising how men sometimes looked at her. More it was older men rather than guys her age, for some reason. […] There were guys - older guys - she’d yearned for so frankly you could see it in her face.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden: A Novel

“She feel these hands tremble, and she could feel Mr. Kidder’s excitement. How eager she was to be gone from this room. Her heart was beating in mild revulsion from the man’s touch, but Katya forced herself to remain still, politely unresisting. In Mr. Kidder’s eyes, which brimmed with moisture, Katya saw such tenderness for her, such desire, or love, she felt that her throat might close, she might begin to cry. Gravely Mr. Kidder lowered his face to hers. Katya held her breath, but he just brushed his lips against her forehead and did not try to kiss her on the mouth.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“NO KISS FORGOTTEN; it resides in the memory as in the flesh, and so Katya many times felt the press of Marcus Kidder’s warm mouth on hers in the days and especially in the nights following. And her heartbeat quickened in protest: How could you! Kiss him! That old man! Kiss him! Let him put his arms around you ad kiss you and kiss him back! The old man’s mouth and Katya Spivak’s mouth! How could you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“She could feel these hands tremble, and she could feel Mr. Kidder’s excitement. How eager she was to be gone from this room. Her heart was beating in mild revulsion from the man’s touch, but Katya forced herself to remain still, politely unresisting. In Mr. Kidder’s eyes, which brimmed with moisture, Katya saw such tenderness for her, such desire, or love, she felt that her throat might close, she might begin to cry. Gravely Mr. Kidder lowered his face to hers. Katya held her breath, but he just brushed his lips against her forehead and did not try to kiss her on the mouth.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“If this was a flirtation — and it felt like a flirtation — it was like no other flirtation in Katya’s experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden

“You can be on easy terms with such a man, you can see that he likes you, then by mistake you say the wrong word or make the wrong assumption and something shuts down in his face. Like an iron grating over a pawnshop window on a rundown street in Atlantic City. That abrupt.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden: A dark novel of suspense

“Katya stood in the doorway at the rear of Mr Kidder’s studio and could not seem to step out onto the terrace and run away. Panting like a dog that has been trained by his master and can’t break out of his training, though his training has hurt, humbled, humiliated him and enslaved him.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden: A dark novel of suspense