The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash berries hanging like embers in the general misty brown of the world.

— Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley Quotes

Every novel I’ve written has been about finding stuff out. I’m motivated much more by curiosity than by self-expression.

— Jane Smiley

And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.

— Jane Smiley

We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts you were allowed to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind.

— Jane Smiley

I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future.

— Jane Smiley

Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world’s details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me. Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.

— Jane Smiley

Sometimes these days Dean felt like picking up the phone and calling his buddy Michael Jordan and chortling with him over how he’d played Continental Dairy Industries off against National Milk, but of course he didn’t have Michael’s number.

— Jane Smiley

So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.

— Jane Smiley

Her parents took her very seriously; she had trained them, with a combination of treats and punishments, to allow her to do as she pleased and express herself, and to pay attention to her opinions. Thanks.

— Jane Smiley

Don’t you want to know what happened?” Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, “No, I don’t, because I don’t want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you’re gonna want to tell it, so don’t bother.

— Jane Smiley

She chewed the tender meat and sucked out the juices and felt the sauce coat her tongue and roll down her throat. After that, he looked still better. Another.

— Jane Smiley

Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn’t looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant something to him at one time. He found it, and found the key, and carried it downstairs without opening it.

— Jane Smiley

It was not that he felt that the world would damage or hurt Frankie in any way, it was much more that there were plenty of things out in the world that Frankie would learn about, and that he would then have no scruples at all.

— Jane Smiley

One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsion to tear up their clothes and braid them into rag rugs.

— Jane Smiley

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?

— Jane Smiley

In truth Mr Jonas Silk was as niggardly as he was jealous, and my sister Beatrice had as much interest in Kansas as she did in the czar of all the Russias, and so my brother Mr. Horace Silk worked out his plans in a white heat of frustrated eagerness.

— Jane Smiley

What Is Really Going On in Spain? was another. Who’s the Boss? was about whether members of the.

— Jane Smiley

Once again, the curious thing was how strange and forceful the world was, how it battered and clanged and could not be withstood, and yet some individuals withstood it while others did not.

— Jane Smiley

This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.

— Jane Smiley

Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repellent it is, they are glad enough to welcome it.

— Jane Smiley

You don’t make ’em trot for one thing and run for the other.

— Jane Smiley
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