Joyce Carol Oates Box Quotations

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.