Best 129 quotes of Jane Smiley on MyQuotes

Jane Smiley

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

    All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.

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    Jane Smiley

    A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

    Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.

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    Jane Smiley

    Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

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    Jane Smiley

    A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

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    Jane Smiley

    An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

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    Jane Smiley

    'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.

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    Jane Smiley

    A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

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    Jane Smiley

    As Fallingwater demonstrates, Wright's genius was always specific, but also always lively, always daring.

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    Jane Smiley

    As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.

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    Jane Smiley

    A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

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    Jane Smiley

    Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

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    Jane Smiley

    Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

    Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

    Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!

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    Jane Smiley

    English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

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    Jane Smiley

    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!'

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    Jane Smiley

    Every novel deals with social problems. It can't help it because the protagonist must come in conflict with his group. So the author has to offer an analysis of how the group and the protagonist fit. Otherwise, the reader will just say, "This makes no sense," and will put it away.

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

    Giving his lecture for the third time freed Dr. Lionel Gift from paying much attention to it. He had a naturally expressive style of delivery, hones over the years in elementary-econ lecture halls. He knew, without even thinking, to address the middle rows of the hall, but to occasionally "shoot" the listeners in the back corners. He knew how to make eye contact and solicit the attention of those who were thinking of other things.

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

    Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.

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    Jane Smiley

    Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

    I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

    If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

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

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    Jane Smiley

    I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning to drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.

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    Jane Smiley

    I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.

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    Jane Smiley

    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.

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    Jane Smiley

    I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view. It's really fun. It's not erotic.

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    Jane Smiley

    In December 1998, I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship, one that had grown more slowly than I had wished, but once it flowered it was much more stimulating than any marriage or relationship I had known.

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    Jane Smiley

    In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.

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    Jane Smiley

    In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

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    Jane Smiley

    In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

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    Jane Smiley

    In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

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    Jane Smiley

    I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

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    Jane Smiley

    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.