Quotes from Jane Smiley

But even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries.

Who you are shapes how you are loved.

We're not going to be sad. We're going to be angry until we die. It's the only hope.

She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.

Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges.

The best that can happen to a girl, Claire, is to be a bit plain, like you. You think I'm being unkind, but I am telling you a truth. A plain girl has a longer time to herself, and when a man falls in love with her, he loves her for herself, for who she is.

not to borrow trouble by worrying about it.

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.

When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

And she had gone off from her husband to live by herself with the priests, had she not? Does a man, seeing a trinket lying before him in the grass, fail to pick it up?

You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn't seen when we were walking in? That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow. And then it seemed like if we just threw off all restraints and talked wildly and ate wildly and shopped wildly, it would just turn up the delirium, and make it even better, or permanent somehow...

It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.

contemplate the difference between a reason and an excuse. A reason is its own reward, but an excuse leads to disappointment every time.

like a man who has jumped off a diving board, but then, through force of will, lowers himself inch by inch into the pool.

War is inevitable when the world is fallen. If you stop one, another will start. Redemption is the only path away from war.

In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea.

Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.

The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn't be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew they were really scouts.

The real mystery was how your farm bound you to it, so tightly that you would pay any price (literally, in interest) or make any sacrifice just to take these steps across this familiar undulating ground time and time again.

Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex.

Sometimes the thing that you wanted to do did make you sigh, just because it was a hard thing to do.

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.

I'm not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.

rain or snow. Mama worried and Papa was impressed;