Top 200 Jane Smiley Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.”

— Jane Smiley

102. “As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.”

— Jane Smiley

103. “Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.”

— Jane Smiley

104. “Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people’s heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The.”

— Jane Smiley

105. “I always think that things have to happen the way they do happen, that there are so many inner and outer forces joining at every event that it becomes a kind of fate. I learned from studying Buddhism that there’s beauty, and certainly a lot of peace, in accepting that.” I sniffed. A smile twinkled sheepishly across his face. “Okay, okay,” he said, “how about this? If you worry about it, you draw it to you.”

— Jane Smiley

106. “If there’s anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money – how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.”

— Jane Smiley

107. “I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.”

— Jane Smiley

108. “She chewed the tender meat and sucked out the juices and felt the sauce coat her tongue and roll down her throat. After that, he looked still better. Another.”

— Jane Smiley

109. “Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he’s done before is still with us, still right here in this room until there’s true remorse.”

— Jane Smiley

110. “Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.”

— Jane Smiley

111. “One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsion to tear up their clothes and braid them into rag rugs.”

— Jane Smiley

112. “This is my thought, that for every soul, something must come to pass, and for everything that does come to pass, every soul can imagine many things that might have come to pass, all of them less evil than what actually fell out. Folk must have something to think on, or they would be unable to hope for Heaven or remember Paradise.”

— Jane Smiley

113. “The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn’t be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew they were really scouts.”

— Jane Smiley

114. “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

115. “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

116. “I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.”

— Jane Smiley

117. “She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.”

— Jane Smiley

118. “Well, being a perfectionist seems okay from the outside, but a perfectionist never enjoys anything, no matter how well it goes, because nothing is ever perfect.”

— Jane Smiley

119. “She could not imagine what she could do to reconstruct all the things she enjoyed, and she could hardly remember what it was that she had enjoyed.”

— Jane Smiley

120. “Sometimes these days Dean felt like picking up the phone and calling his buddy Michael Jordan and chortling with him over how he’d played Continental Dairy Industries off against National Milk, but of course he didn’t have Michael’s number.”

— Jane Smiley

121. “Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.”

— Jane Smiley

122. “I had a burden lift off me that I hadn’t even felt the heaviness of until then, and it was the burden of having to wait and see what was going to happen.”

— Jane Smiley

123. “Curiosity in humans is to be punished – it leads to disaster.”

— Jane Smiley

124. “Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn’t looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it.”

— Jane Smiley

125. “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

126. “Seeing him somewhere was always a pleasure, like taking a drink of water.”

— Jane Smiley

127. “Novelists never have to footnote.”

— Jane Smiley

128. “The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.”

— Jane Smiley

129. “In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.”

— Jane Smiley

130. “Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.”

— Jane Smiley

131. “Who you are shapes how you are loved.”

— Jane Smiley

132. “We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts you were allowed to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.”

— Jane Smiley

133. “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

134. “To bring him into such agonies as a man should never know, to deny him shrift, to tear his flesh shred from shred. And how will I ever be forgiven for such a lust as this?”

— Jane Smiley

135. “What you saw was what you got, and she did not believe, as some of the other girls said, that the boys at the parties were separate from some sober incarnation of the same boys.”

— Jane Smiley

136. “Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex.”

— Jane Smiley

137. “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

138. “Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don’t know any smokers now, not even my mom.”

— Jane Smiley

139. “I’m not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.”

— Jane Smiley

140. “Once again, the curious thing was how strange and forceful the world was, how it battered and clanged and could not be withstood, and yet some individuals withstood it while others did not.”

— Jane Smiley

141. “After he got back to his apartment that evening, Arthur remembered how completely he’d thought he’d solved the problem of his own childhood once he’d claimed Lillian and enveloped her in his dream – no one idle, no one beset by solitude, everyone laughing. The problem he had not solved, or even known existed, was how quickly it passed, every joke, every embrace, every babyhood and childhood, every moment of thinking that he had things figured out for good.”

— Jane Smiley

142. “My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.”

— Jane Smiley

143. “The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash berries hanging like embers in the general misty brown of the world.”

— Jane Smiley

144. “Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth.”

— Jane Smiley

145. “I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.”

— Jane Smiley

146. “So it was with Vigdis’ neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbors had been summoned before the Thing on suspicion of hay stealing or sheep stealing, when anyone could see that the hay had only been used up, and the sheep had only been lost in the hills above the steading.”

— Jane Smiley

147. “She knew one of the great family truths, that aunts always help, whilr moms always think it would be good for you if you did it yourself.”

— Jane Smiley

148. “It was one of life’s treats, wasn’t it, paying a visit to your past, swinging like a ball on a string away from the person you loved, always knowing that the string must pull you back, and you would be oh so glad to get there.”

— Jane Smiley

149. “The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I’m being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.”

— Jane Smiley

150. “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