Jane Smiley Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Jane Smiley on Wise Famous Quotes.
There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
I spent part of my college years in a Marxist commune. I was not a Marxist. I wasn't even pretending to be one. I was a Marxist-in-law.
what it feels like to resist without seeming to resist, to absent yourself while seeming respectful and attentive.
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.
There were so many things Rosanna could have been besides a farm wife, she thought. But it was not a source of regret - it was a source of pride.
I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
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.
The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'
In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea.
It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.
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.
Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
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.
If you don't furnish your brain with what everyone knows, then it will furnish itself with what no one else knows!
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses
My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.
Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew what to do with its sour fruit.
We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don't get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much.
It still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.
Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.
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.
War is inevitable when the world is fallen. If you stop one, another will start. Redemption is the only path away from war.
Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
Ron Paul, who, as someone said, wouldn't have regulated a sewer pipe running through his child's playroom.
A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.
Everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.
Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.
Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
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.
I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.
I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.
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.
As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.
Contemplate the difference between a reason and an excuse. A reason is its own reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time.
With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief.