Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres (1991).

Quotes

Fiction

The Age of Grief (1987)

• She often wondered whether cleanliness drove love away. Fastidious, she suspected that life itself was to be found in dirt and disorder, in unknown dark substances that she was hesitant to touch.
  • "Lily"

• I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. I don’t think it is years themselves, or the disintegration of the body. Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better-looking than ever. What it is, is what we know, now that in spite of ourselves we have stopped to think about it. It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless. It is not only that, by this time, a lot of acquaintances and friends have died and all the others are getting ready to sooner or later. It is more that the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—after all that schooling, all that care. Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me. But when you are thirty-three, or thirty-five, the cup must come around, cannot pass from you, and it is the same cup of pain that every mortal drinks from. Dana cried over Mrs. Hilton. My eyes filled during the nightly news. Obviously we were grieving for ourselves, but we were also thinking that if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it? We were grieving for them, too. I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.
  • "The Age of Grief"

• I will never see her, hard as I try to look past love. My eyes will always cast a light over her, and I will always think that this love, mine for her, is a dear thing. But it is as common as sand, as common as flesh.
  • "The Age of Grief"

• Teeth outlast everything. Death is nothing to a tooth. Hundreds of years in acidic soil just keeps a tooth clean. A fire that burns away hair and flesh and even bone leaves teeth dazzling like daisies in the ashes. Life is what destroys teeth. Undiluted apple juice in a baby bottle, sourballs, the pH balance of drinking water, tetracycline, sand in your bread if you were in the Roman army, biting seal-gut thread if you are an Eskimo woman, playing the trumpet, pulling your own teeth with a pliers. In their hearts, most dentists are certain that their patients can’t be trusted with their teeth, but you can’t grieve for every tooth, every mouth. You can’t even grieve for the worst of them; you can only send the patient home with as many of the teeth he came in with as possible.
  • "The Age of Grief"

• Dana seemed to me to be sort of like a hot-air balloon. The more weight we could hang on her, in terms of children, houses, belongings, foodstuffs, office equipment, and debts, the harder it would be for her to gain altitude.
  • "The Age of Grief"

• There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.
  • "The Age of Grief"

The Greenlanders (1988)

• This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.
  • Pt. 1 (Sira Jon loq.)

• This is my thought, that for every soul, something must come to pass, and for everything that does come to pass, every soul can imagine many things that might have come to pass, all of them less evil than what actually fell out. Folk must have something to think on, or they would be unable to hope for Heaven or remember Paradise.
  • Pt. 1

• Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves?
  • Pt. 2

• 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.
  • Pt. 2

• My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.
  • Pt. 3

• 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?
  • Pt. 3

• Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world-in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion.
  • Pt. 3

• It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.
  • Pt. 3

• 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.
  • Pt. 3

• Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.
  • Pt. 3

A Thousand Acres (1991)

• 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.

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

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

• Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space.

• Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.

• We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.

• Even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries.

• Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced.

• She dressed to look good, and I dressed for obscurity.

• Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts.

• 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.

• I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.

• They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up.

• It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success.

Moo (1995)

• Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.
  • Pt. 1, ch. 6

• She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.
  • Pt. 2, ch. 27

• The thick, sugary covering of the snow.
  • Pt. 3, ch. 46

• How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink?
  • Pt. 4, ch. 49

• It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.
  • Pt. 5, ch. 62

Golden Age (2015)

• Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place.
  • 1990

• He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.
  • 1999

• She said, “Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.”
  • 2015

Non-fiction

• Undecided about whether to pursue art or engineering, he pursued engineering, but with a continued interest in design—for his senior school project, he had designed a city of the future (à la Fritz Lang's Metropolis) based on a hexagonal grid. Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider—to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.
  • The Man Who Invented the Computer (2010), ch. 3

• 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.
  • "Everything I need to know I learned from a horse", CNN.com (September 5, 2011)

Charles Dickens (2003)

• Dickens...spoke in a new voice, in a new form, to a new audience, of a new world, about several old ideas reconsidered for the new system of capitalism—that care and respect are owed to the weakest and meekest in society, rather than to the strongest; that the ways in which class and money divide humans from one another are artificial and dangerous; that pleasure and physical comfort are positive goods; that the spiritual lives of the powerful have social and economic ramifications. We might today call this an ecological perspective, an intuitive understanding of the social world as a web rather than a hierarchy—the quintessential modern mode of seeing the world. Dickens grasped this idea from the earliest stages of his career and demonstrated his increasingly sophisticated grasp of it in the plots, characterizations, themes, and style of every single novel he wrote. This is the root source of his greatness.
  • Ch. 2

• The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.
  • Ch. 2

A Year at the Races (2004)

• What truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute — for horses.
  • Ch. 3

• 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.
  • Ch. 3

• Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all.
  • Ch. 7

• It is neither floating nor springing. It is power without labor, thrust without force, the very opposite of any sort of aggression, the particular physics of his anatomy, the demonstration and the effect of his personality.
  • Ch. 16

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2006)

• 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.
  • Introduction

• Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
  • Ch. 2

• 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.
  • Ch. 3

• The novel integrates several forms of human intelligence — verbal intelligence (for the style), psychological intelligence (for the characters), logical intelligence (for the plot), spatial intelligence (for the symbolic and metaphorical content as well as the setting), and even musical intelligence (for pacing and rhythm).
  • Ch. 3

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Jane Smiley on Wikipedia