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.Collection: Reading
People with good intentions never give up!Collection: Giving Up
The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.Collection: Numbers
With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief.Collection: Grief
As soon as you bring up money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.Collection: Political
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.Collection: Teaching
One of the things that Ivar knew about Mrs. Walker was that she would only tell him what she knew if he asked the right question, so he spent a portion of his time meditating over what he might ask Mrs. Walker and how he might phrase the question.Collection: Intellectual
Many said that now there was no hope of salvation, for a man might do anything and be in the wrong. There was no way to tell. It was better to stay on the steading and mind the cows and be content with such days as are left to one and cease to wonder about life everlasting.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Children
When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.Collection: People
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.Collection: Life
But what truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute-for horsesCollection: Girl
Novelists never have to footnote.Collection: Novelists
Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Book
There are five things that societies do: They reproduce; they produce food; they organize themselves in terms of law; they organize themselves in terms of belief; and they make art. Four of them are about conformity, and in these, everything would go more smoothly if people just would shut up and do what they're told. But in art it doesn't work that way.Collection: Art
Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.Collection: Writing
Some people do wait their whole lives for something, and it's only when that thing arrives that they find out that they've been waiting rather than living.Collection: People
You cannot be an egomaniac on the horse. If you lose your temper and start beating him, either you will destroy him, or he will destroy you. As soon as you start riding horses seriously, you're being disciplined on a daily basis about how ignorant you are and what there is left for you to learn.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Book
The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.Collection: Childhood
you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.Collection: Revenge
A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.Collection: Novelists
The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.Collection: Essence
Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.Collection: Avid
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.Collection: Assessment
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.Collection: Happy Birthday
everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Creating
My characters never die screaming in rage. They attempt to pull themselves back together and go on. And that's basically a conservative view of life.Collection: Character
Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.Collection: Food
There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.Collection: Book
The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.Collection: Family
How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors.Collection: Favors
Hungry ears are sharp ones.Collection: Ears
A horse herd was, in its very essence, the manifestation of the expression 'It's always something.Collection: Horse
I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.Collection: Romance