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Jane Smiley Quotes

born 1949 United States

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).

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Random Jane Smiley quote

41 quotes

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

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2006)

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

Golden Age (2015)

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

Charles Dickens (2003)

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

A Year at the Races (2004)

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.

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.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2006)

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 (1987)

Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.

Moo (1995)

It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.

Moo (1995)

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

Golden Age (2015)

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

The Greenlanders (1988)

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

Golden Age (2015)

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.

The Age of Grief (1987)

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?

Moo (1995)

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

The Greenlanders (1988)

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

A Thousand Acres (1991)

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

A Thousand Acres (1991)

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.

The Greenlanders (1988)

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

A Thousand Acres (1991)

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.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2006)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jane Smiley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.