Quotes from Lee Smith

I think as the world changes, we have to keep up. We have to note what is happening, and I think writing has always had a powerful corrective influence and possibility. We have to write about what's good, and we also have to write about parts of our culture that are not good, that are not working out. I think it takes a new eye.

And are we not all "mere guests" upon this whirling earth?

What I didn't understand, all those years when I was waiting for my life to start, was that it had already started. I was already living it! Those were the most important years, and I didn't even know it.

But I would do it all again, every bit of it, I would lose him again just to have him again for an hour, for a minute, for even a second. I would do it all again just to see his face.

Myself I love a thunderstorm better than anything. Sometimes I will run to the top of the hill to whirl around and around on my Indian Rock in the wind, it is like a dance I can not stop. The smell of the lightning goes into your nose and down your whole body. Old Bess says if you get hit by lightning yet live you will have special powers, well I could use some of those. So I don't care if I get hit or not.

Oh, I was young then, and I walked in my body like a Queen.

People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

If Strength comes through Suffering, why then I should be the strongest of all women, yet I am the weakest. God help me. Help me.

Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end?

The state of my nerves precludes any more active an existence

Oh I know what they say about us in town, and I say, the hell with them! I tell you, I don't give a damn. I have got to be an old woman in the twinkling of an eye, and it is sort of a relief, I can tell you. I do what I want to now. Last week I traded all our eggs for ice cream at Holden's Grocery. Now that I have shrunk down little as a child, I figure I might as well act like one. I don't care. I like ice cream. Juney does too. We like to put bourbon in it, and make ourselves a milkshake.

Oh, if our children actually knew how much we love them, they'd never be able to hit any of these balls, they'd be simply immobilized by the force of it, by the awful force of our love.

They say experience is the best teacher, but I'll be damned if I know what it teaches you.

Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.

Now courting's a pleasure, and parting is grief, but a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief!

And I belive I am too, and if you think that is awful, then you dont understand a thing.

Perhaps any life is such: different stories like different strands, each distinct in itself, each true, yet wound together to form one rope, one life.

It's true that when anyone dies, the other dead rise up abd die all over again.

For once I am living my life rather than watching it pass in review.

It is a funny thing but you can actually see improved mental health in the eyes

Then I started crying for it seemed to me then that life is nothing but people leaving.

Away acrost his valley he sees Black Mountain rising jagged to the sky...and if he looks to the left on past it, he sees all the furtherest ranges, line on line. Purple and blue and blue again and smoky until you can't tell the mountains apart from the sky. Lord, it'll make a man think something, seeing that. It'll make a man think deep.

for in the world of the mad, time is not a continuum but a fluid, shifting place, relative to nothing.

Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives. Writing cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life, and it can always help us make it through the night.