Quotes from Jane Smiley

It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.

But she could only remember that it was good, not how it felt.

Actually, she often wondered whether cleanliness drove love away. Fastidious, she suspected that life itself was to be found in dirt and disorder, in unknown dark substances that she was hesitant to touch.

Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up.

Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves?

The pastor boomed out again: "My friends, who can say where it will end? Who can say when the Lord will at last be pleased with us?

Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place. Felicity was her last chance to enjoy this, and so she did, day after day

He'd said, "Remember that Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times'? The dairy farmer's curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows.

surprised. Then everyone, by unspoken

He trusted only Devers, and why was that? Devers said, "We're going here," and they went there. Devers said, "Expect this and that," and this and that came to pass. But the rumor was that Ike didn't like Devers, and Frank figured this was the reason—Devers didn't have his head up his ass, and everyone else did.

and the horticulturalists really believed that gardening would save the world that agriculture was destroying.

All those cows with the same pattern of black and white, all turning their heads at the same time, all mooing in unison (his first love was still cloning) and all feeling pregnant when they were not, didn't seem to be an image she could hold in her head along with the rest of what she knew about life.

There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren't any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, ready to eat, fuck, fetch, piss on the bushes.

how does the devil get into you like that?

but from this distance, the velvety reds, flashing yellows and glassy whites [of the roses] seemed to break up the light of the summer sun into its various elements and cast it back far more brilliantly than any other flower ever could, seemed not exactly of the earth, but of space and air itself.

She had felt a surge of fear so strong

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

I thought about having sex with Jess Clark and I could feel my flesh turn electric at these thoughts, cold feel sensation gather at my nipples, could feel my vagina relax and open, could feel my lips and fingertips grow sensitive enough to know their own shapes.

cats swore that they had pretended to be domesticated to protect themselves—any cat who lived with a human did so under duress, and all cats escaped whenever they could.

However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.

Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people's heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The

She knew one of the great family truths, that aunts always help, whilr moms always think it would be good for you if you did it yourself

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high school.