Jane Smiley quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Jane Smiley

Top Jane Smiley Quotes

Browse top 47 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Jane Smiley.

Favorite Jane Smiley Quotes

1. "I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was." ~ Jane Smiley

2. "Had I faced all the facts It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced." ~ Jane Smiley

3. "Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all." ~ Jane Smiley

4. "If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness." ~ Jane Smiley

5. "A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct." ~ Jane Smiley

6. "I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn." ~ Jane Smiley

7. "The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive." ~ Jane Smiley

8. "But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries." ~ Jane Smiley

9. "Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn't look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space." ~ Jane Smiley

10. "...and the thick, sugary covering of the snow..." ~ Jane Smiley

11. "You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn't seen when we were walking in? That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow. And then it seemed like if we just threw off all restraints and talked wildly and ate wildly and shopped wildly, it would just turn up the delirium, and make it even better, or permanent somehow..." ~ Jane Smiley

12. "They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up." ~ Jane Smiley

13. "At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road." ~ Jane Smiley

14. "The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence." ~ Jane Smiley

15. "When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment." ~ Jane Smiley

16. "...but from this distance, the velvety reds, flashing yellows and glassy whites [of the roses] seemed to break up the light of the summer sun into its various elements and cast it back far more brilliantly than any other flower ever could, seemed not exactly of the earth, but of space and air itself." ~ Jane Smiley

17. "It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about." ~ Jane Smiley

18. "A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system." ~ Jane Smiley

19. "Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for." ~ Jane Smiley

20. "English majors understand human nature better than economists do." ~ Jane Smiley

21. "Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too." ~ Jane Smiley

22. "All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture." ~ Jane Smiley

23. "There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win." ~ Jane Smiley

24. "Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting." ~ Jane Smiley

25. "Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel." ~ Jane Smiley

26. "Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer's is coming mocks all one's aspirations - to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one's accomplishments and hard work - in a way that old familiar death does not." ~ Jane Smiley

27. "A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together." ~ Jane Smiley

28. "An urban novelist never minds a little decay." ~ Jane Smiley

29. "A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice." ~ Jane Smiley

30. "As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring." ~ Jane Smiley

31. "Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!" ~ Jane Smiley

32. "In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high." ~ Jane Smiley

33. "One of the profound effects of economics in our day is that the people with the money and the power have embraced the guilt-free, external-less, everything-will-turn-out-okay-in-the-end philosophy of economics in order to justify their own evil works. And the economists, for the most part, have sucked up to that money." ~ Jane Smiley

34. "In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion." ~ Jane Smiley

35. "Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves." ~ Jane Smiley

36. "Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders." ~ Jane Smiley

37. "Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges." ~ Jane Smiley

38. "Laura's gossip was redeemed by its lack of spite. She was warmly objective about every event, taking endless delight in action and complexity, as if she had been bed-ridden in a small windowless room for years and was just now discovering the dramatic possibilities of daily life. She sang Alice through the day." ~ Jane Smiley

39. "...and that's how the tournament started, the Million Dollar World Series of Monopoly......Jess and Pete thought alike -- like city boys, my father would have said, looking for the payoff in a situation rather than the pitfall. Rose and Ty and I played like farmers, looking for pitfalls, holes, drop-offs, something small that will tip the tractor, break it, eat into your time, your crop, the profits that already exist in your mind, and not only as a result of crop projections and long-range forecasts, but also as an ideal that has never been attained, but could be this year." ~ Jane Smiley

40. "War is inevitable when the world is fallen. If you stop one, another will start. Redemption is the only path away from war." ~ Jane Smiley

41. "You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?" ~ Jane Smiley

42. "Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist." ~ Jane Smiley

43. "Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past." ~ Jane Smiley

44. "A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this." ~ Jane Smiley

45. "But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses" ~ Jane Smiley

46. "Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse." ~ Jane Smiley

47. "Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book." ~ Jane Smiley

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Today's Quote

This," said Laurent, "is a little more—"It was a word of sharp points: "—intimate," he said, "than ice." "Too intimate?" Damen said. Slowly, he was kneading Laurent's shoulders.He did not usually think of himself as someone with suicidal impulses."
Author: C.S. Pacat

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