Jane Smiley famous quotes

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
-- Jane Smiley

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Reading

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.
-- Jane Smiley

#Perfect #Firsts

I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.
-- Jane Smiley

#Waiting

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.
-- Jane Smiley

#Children #Ideas #Germs

Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, 'God, this is fascinating!'
-- Jane Smiley

#Children #Fall #Writing

The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.
-- Jane Smiley

#Running #Spiritual #Fall

I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.
-- Jane Smiley

#Issues #Care #Tag

But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horses
-- Jane Smiley

#Girl #Horse #Children

Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
-- Jane Smiley

#Men #Groups #Playgrounds

Fascination with horses predated every other single thing I knew. Before I was a mother, before I was a writer, before I knew the facts of life, before I was a schoolgirl, before I learned to read, I wanted a horse.
-- Jane Smiley

#Mother #Horse #Fascination

Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.
-- Jane Smiley

#Dark #Narrative #Firsts

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?
-- Jane Smiley

#Love #Marriage #Responsibility

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.
-- Jane Smiley

#Ice Cream #Fuel #Candy

Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
-- Jane Smiley

#Perfect #Goal #Rough Drafts

Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
-- Jane Smiley

#Doctors #Vets #Injury

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.
-- Jane Smiley

#Brother #Sibling #Sister In Law

Mom was a smoker. My grandfather was a smoker. My aunts were smokers. My uncles were smokers. I don't know any smokers now, not even my mom.
-- Jane Smiley

#Mom #Uncles #Aunt

Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.
-- Jane Smiley

#Ignorance #Long #United States

Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.
-- Jane Smiley

#Writing #People #Interesting

Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.
-- Jane Smiley

#Naps #Ideas #Together

After a long day, folk rest at night. After a long summer, folk play games and sit about in the winter. After a long life folk sit about the fire and stay warm, for the chill of death is upon them, and even the thickest bearskin can't keep off the shivering.
-- Jane Smiley

#Life #Summer #Winter

My mom was paranoid about my safety.
-- Jane Smiley

#Mom #Safety #My Mom

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

#Son #Grandchildren #Like You

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.
-- Jane Smiley

#Horse #Generosity #Example

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.
-- Jane Smiley

#Happy Birthday #Winter #Years

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.
-- Jane Smiley

#Children #Father #Believe

The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.
-- Jane Smiley

#Ideas #Tolerance #Individuality

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

#People

I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.
-- Jane Smiley

#Romance #Fascination #Categories

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
-- Jane Smiley

#Numbers #Different #Stories

I say, when your hair turns gray and your children think they know who you are, do the thing that shakes up who you think you are, even who you had prided yourself on being. When all those around you say they simply don't recognize you any longer, that's the real compliment.
-- Jane Smiley

#Children #Real #Thinking

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
-- Jane Smiley

#Tragedy #Want #Novel

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?
-- Jane Smiley

#Friendship #Summer #Mother

The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.
-- Jane Smiley

#Views #Talking #America

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.
-- Jane Smiley

#Writing #Thinking #Remember

it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
-- Jane Smiley

#Food #Years #San Francisco

A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something.
-- Jane Smiley

#Horse #Expression #Essence

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
-- Jane Smiley

#Ignorance #Self #Mind

Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.
-- Jane Smiley

#Lying #Wicked #Good Intentions

Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
-- Jane Smiley

#Love Is #Emotion

you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
-- Jane Smiley

#Revenge #Facts

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.
-- Jane Smiley

#Novelists

Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
-- Jane Smiley

#Writing #Novel

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
-- Jane Smiley

#Writing #Desire #Novel

Novelists never have to footnote.
-- Jane Smiley

#Novelists #Footnotes

everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.
-- Jane Smiley

#Thinking #Toxic #Toxins

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion. ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.
-- Jane Smiley

#Thinking #Critical #Liberal Education

Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.
-- Jane Smiley

#Creating #United States #Credit

How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors.
-- Jane Smiley

#Favors #Farming #Farmers

The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.
-- Jane Smiley

#Family #Coming Out #Tolerate

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

#Eye #Desire #Blind

The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
-- Jane Smiley

#Care #Republican #Fear Of Love

People are quite frequently eccentric.
-- Jane Smiley

#People #Eccentric

Respect and fear are two different things.
-- Jane Smiley

#Two #Different

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
-- Jane Smiley

#Book #Delight #Pages

If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.
-- Jane Smiley

#Character #Mean #Males

Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
-- Jane Smiley

#Crowds #Novel

I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
-- Jane Smiley

#Children #Believe #Parent

I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
-- Jane Smiley

#Thinking #Years #Two

With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.
-- Jane Smiley

#Steps #One Step At A Time #Easy

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.
-- Jane Smiley

#Horse #Ignorance #Years

I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.
-- Jane Smiley

#Children #House #Noise

a bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.
-- Jane Smiley

#Book #Avid #Order

The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
-- Jane Smiley

#Essence #Giving #Charity

Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
-- Jane Smiley

#Avid #Names #Poetry