Jane Smiley Quotes

102 quotes in 1619 categories

• 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…
• 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…
• Whatever you love is beautiful; love comes first, beauty follows. The greater your capacity for love, the more beauty you find in the world.
• Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these…
• 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,…
• 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…
• Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red 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…
• Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.
• My mom was paranoid about my safety.
• 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.…
• 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…
• The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
• People are quite frequently eccentric.
• Respect and fear are two different things.
• 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…
• 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…
• Trollope wrote so many novels and other works that they tend to crowd each other out.
• I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
• 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…

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