Quotes from Jane Smiley

dark, wet sides of the well dropped maybe

Arthur said, You must know that you don't love children for being good or bad. I know you know that. Why do you love them? Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don't know what's coming and maybe you do.

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.

After him came a cast of characters out of her worst nightmares—Linda Chavez, Arch Puddington, twenty others as bad, all of whom, she could imagine, had a secret password such as a derogatory remark about Toni Morrison, whom Margaret considered a goddess.

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.

Laura's gossip was redeemed by its lack of spite. She was warmly objective about every event, taking endless delight in action and complexity, as if she had been bed-ridden in a small windowless room for years and was just now discovering the dramatic possibilities of daily life. She sang Alice through the day.

What you did when you wanted to get away with something was not to plan, but to look for an opportunity

Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.

the two of them prayed to Jesus that they might learn their lessons sooner rather than later, and that they would be gentle lessons rather than hard lessons.

What do you think makes you start laughing and unable to stop?

He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.

you, Frankie. I just don't. You look like an angel, so

DR. LIONEL GIFT IS in bed with Arlen Martin, billionaire, but only in the Washington, D.C., sense.

So it was with Vigdis' neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbors had been summoned before the Thing on suspicion of hay stealing or sheep stealing, when anyone could see that the hay had only been used up, and the sheep had only been lost in the hills above the steading.

A girl who made no mistakes about the right shade of lipstick would always land on her feet.

who was wearing a very handsome

Her stare was like a small room he couldn't get out of.

but, between you and me, being a woman is a dangerous business, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Oh, those men

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.

Most men, in fact, were competent in groups that mimicked the playground, incompetent in groups that mimicked the family; that was why all-male committees ran the most smoothly.

How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink? Which did not mean

Well, Jesus never did a single bad thing, but when he was crucified, he made up for all the bad things that other people had done. That's why he was crucified.

He laughed with a kind of mirthless bark.

but no matter how receptive his pretty and sweet speech therapist looked, no matter how softly and encouragingly she said, "Go ahead, try it. Say it," still, the sounds came out like mooing.