Quotes from Jane Smiley

Mama said that there was not going to be a bank robbery—the Lord wouldn't allow it. Frank didn't see why not, and Papa seemed to agree with him—he said, "Well, he's allowed plenty of 'em." Mama said that sometimes Satan got away with things and sometimes he didn't

am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later.

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she'd ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn't very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her).

She said, "Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.

Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.

the novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness. But

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.

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.

Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who've really faced the facts.

Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world's details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me. Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.

not unlike a bomb blast, two years after that, where was he, northern France, if you called Cambrai France (some people didn't, they called it "Kamerijk

hands behind his head. He took another deep breath. The whore

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.

eidetic memory. What else any of it meant to

a check from the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

She knows what she wants, though maybe she doesn't know what will work. But if you don't give her what she wants, she'll spend the rest of her life thinking that that was the one thing that might have worked.

Farmers' Holiday Association.

Solidarity is the most important thing. The bosses and the bankers have it. We have to have it, too.

JOE COULDN'T STAND the noise. The giant room they

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.

Dejé de ser la intermediaria entre el capataz y los peones, la responsable de todo. La mujer que acababa el día hecha jirones y que era remendada durante la noche con el único propósito de poder ser despedazada de nuevo a la mañana siguiente.

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.

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.

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.