3 December 2020 Jane Smiley I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley The thing about Republicans is that they don’t care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley 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.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley Somehow, knowing that Alzheimer’s is coming mocks all one’s aspirations – to tell stories, to think through certain issues as only a novel can do, to be recognised for one’s accomplishments and hard work – in a way that old familiar death does not.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley 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 my mom.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley In December 1998, I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship, one that had grown more slowly than I had wished, but once it flowered it was much more stimulating than any marriage or relationship I had known.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley 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.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley 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 of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley I was an only child. I’ve known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud – 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life’s mystery and unpredictability, of life’s generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley Vets do what doctors used to – diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
3 December 2020 Jane Smiley In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.
