Top 200 Jane Smiley Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “There’s nothing more haunted than a house. Doesn’t matter where, how grand, how small, made of brick, straw, stone, or gingerbread, whether perfectly cared for or blown to bits. Beings gather there. Every house is a planet, exerting gravitational pull. Every house is in a dark wood, every house has a wicked witch in it, doesn’t matter if she looks like a fairy godmother...”

— Jane Smiley

152. “Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It’s all very nice to say you’re an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make sure we do what you say, think how you think, and remember you’re the boss.”

— Jane Smiley

153. “Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.”

— Jane Smiley

154. “He’d said, “Remember that Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’? The dairy farmer’s curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows.”

— Jane Smiley

155. “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

156. “And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?”

— Jane Smiley

157. “Don’t you want to know what happened?” Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, “No, I don’t, because I don’t want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you’re gonna want to tell it, so don’t bother.”

— Jane Smiley

158. “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

159. “But she could only remember that it was good, not how it felt.”

— Jane Smiley

160. “There weren’t too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.”

— Jane Smiley

161. “He trusted only Devers, and why was that? Devers said, “We’re going here,” and they went there. Devers said, “Expect this and that,” and this and that came to pass. But the rumor was that Ike didn’t like Devers, and Frank figured this was the reason – Devers didn’t have his head up his ass, and everyone else did.”

— Jane Smiley

162. “It was not that he felt that the world would damage or hurt Frankie in any way, it was much more that there were plenty of things out in the world that Frankie would learn about, and that he would then have no scruples at all.”

— Jane Smiley

163. “When your parents don’t like you, then you are free.”

— Jane Smiley

164. “If you lived in the same place long enough, everything reminded you of everything else.”

— Jane Smiley

165. “I’ve experienced having you in the house. It’s like living with a loud motor running all the time. Up, down, into this room and that room, eating supper, jumping from the table, cursing all the time, yelling over the telephone about things, laughing, making deals all the time. You take up a lot of space and make a lot of noise.” She.”

— Jane Smiley

166. “What Is Really Going On in Spain? was another. Who’s the Boss? was about whether members of the.”

— Jane Smiley

167. “In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea.”

— Jane Smiley

168. “If you don’t furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows!”

— Jane Smiley

169. “Joy had never before been to a university party where there were no drinks, and her immediate reaction was that she just couldn’t find it, that there was a bar somewhere in the house where a nice young man in a white jacket was pouring out Bloody Marys, but that no one would tell her where it was.”

— Jane Smiley

170. “She always said, ‘When I’m home, I’ve got to get things done, even if there are visitors. Elizabeth knows how to relax in her own house.’ And then she would shake her head, as if Elizabeth had remarkable powers.”

— Jane Smiley

171. “Farmers’ Holiday Association.”

— Jane Smiley

172. “Actually, she often wondered whether cleanliness drove love away. Fastidious, she suspected that life itself was to be found in dirt and disorder, in unknown dark substances that she was hesitant to touch.”

— Jane Smiley

173. “It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.”

— Jane Smiley

174. “She didn’t relate this memory to Janet, but she did think right then that all golden ages are discovered within. No one would ever know that her father, Carl, the endless Iowa horizon, a pan of shortbread emerging from the oven, and her grandchildren laughing in the next room had indeed made her life a golden age.”

— Jane Smiley

175. “Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place. Felicity was her last chance to enjoy this, and so she did, day after day.”

— Jane Smiley

176. “So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.”

— Jane Smiley

177. “Hmmph, said Mrs. Walker, or rather, without speaking, she launched this hmmph into the air of the room and allowed it to float there.”

— Jane Smiley

178. “Her parents took her very seriously; she had trained them, with a combination of treats and punishments, to allow her to do as she pleased and express herself, and to pay attention to her opinions. Thanks.”

— Jane Smiley

179. “Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama’s lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up.”

— Jane Smiley

180. “I will never see her, hard as I try to look past love. My eyes will always cast a light over her, and I will always think that this love, mine for her, is a dear thing. But it is as common as sand, as common as flesh.”

— Jane Smiley

181. “We drove in a kind of wholesome silence, carrying our whole long marriage, all the hope and kindness that it represented, with us. What it felt like was sitting in Sunday school singing “Jesus loves me,” sitting in the little chairs, surrounded by sunlight and bright drawings, and having those first inklings of doubt, except that doubt presents itself simply as added knowledge, something new, for the moment, to set beside what is already known.”

— Jane Smiley

182. “The pastor boomed out again: “My friends, who can say where it will end? Who can say when the Lord will at last be pleased with us?”

— Jane Smiley

183. “A Jack Russell was about making noise, killing small animals and dragging their carcasses into the house, attacking much larger dogs, refusing to be house-trained, and in all other ways living a primitive life.”

— Jane Smiley

184. “Every novel I’ve written has been about finding stuff out. I’m motivated much more by curiosity than by self-expression.”

— Jane Smiley

185. “The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.”

— Jane Smiley

186. “Epic Steam is easily offended. He has high standards of behavior with regard to his own person, and every human he has met so far has offended them. Other horses aren’t so bad – they have been capable of learning, and so they don’t offend him, and he isn’t mean with them, only bossy. It’s the people who are blind and stubborn.”

— Jane Smiley

187. “You don’t make ’em trot for one thing and run for the other.”

— Jane Smiley

188. “There were no toys under the bed – that wasn’t why he liked it. Why he liked it was that there wasn’t anything under the bed – no chickens, no Joey, no Eloise, no sheep, no “no”s. He could lie under the bed and not be told anything at all.”

— Jane Smiley

189. “In truth Mr Jonas Silk was as niggardly as he was jealous, and my sister Beatrice had as much interest in Kansas as she did in the czar of all the Russias, and so my brother Mr. Horace Silk worked out his plans in a white heat of frustrated eagerness.”

— Jane Smiley

190. “He laughed with a kind of mirthless bark.”

— Jane Smiley

191. “I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future.”

— Jane Smiley

192. “She had felt a surge of fear so strong.”

— Jane Smiley

193. “However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.”

— Jane Smiley

194. “And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.”

— Jane Smiley

195. “Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves?”

— Jane Smiley

196. “Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts.”

— Jane Smiley

197. “Opa used to tease her. He would open her mouth and look at her teeth, like she was a horse. Then he would say, ‘Callie, you are more than ten and less than a hundred.’ Well, she was a poor girl, in the end.”

— Jane Smiley

198. “Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man’s table, or the child from a woman’s breast, or the wife from a man’s bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.”

— Jane Smiley

199. “This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.”

— Jane Smiley

200. “I’m sorry. I would have to disagree. The most important thing is getting right with the Lord, and then he.”

— Jane Smiley