Jane Smiley Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Jane Smiley quote about:
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“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“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 -
“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!'”
-- Jane Smiley -
“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 -
“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 -
“But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses”
-- Jane Smiley -
“Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family”
-- Jane Smiley -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“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 -
“Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“After a long day, folk rest at night. After a long summer, folk play games and sit about in the winter. After a long life folk sit about the fire and stay warm, for the chill of death is upon them, and even the thickest bearskin can't keep off the shivering.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“Twenty-five, he was. Twenty-five tomorrow. Some years the snow had melted for his birthday, but not this year, and so it had been a long winter full of cows.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“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 -
“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 -
“When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.”
-- Jane Smiley -
“The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.”
-- Jane Smiley
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