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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.
Jane Smiley
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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.
Jane Smiley
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Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.
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It was well known to all members of the campus population that other, unnamed groups reaped unimagined monetary advantages in comparison to the monetary disadvantages of one's own group, and that if funds were distributed fairly, according to real merit, for once, some people would have another think coming.
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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.
Jane Smiley
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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.
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In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principles contain it or stand against it.
Jane Smiley
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I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination.
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Invest everything in chickens and pretty soon you're thinking like a chicken. You know how chickens think? I do, because I raised chickens as a boy. Chickens are always looking for little bits of things in the dirt. They don't conceptualize on a higher plane. You step back from chickens and you start conceptualizing on a higher plane. That's my philosophy.
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Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.
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The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.
Jane Smiley
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As soon as you bring up the money, I notice, conversation gets sociological, then political, then moral.
Jane Smiley
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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.
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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.
Jane Smiley
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You know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
Jane Smiley
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Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
Jane Smiley
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Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion.... the converse was true also — faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging.
Jane Smiley
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With preference came point of view; with point of view, personality; with personality, uniqueness; with uniqueness, grief.
Jane Smiley
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It still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.
Jane Smiley
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Prairie settlers always saw a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen the Atlantic.
Jane Smiley
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How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors.
Jane Smiley
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Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.
Jane Smiley
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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
Jane Smiley
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Alice embraced her routine, the spar that would float her out of trouble and into a healthy old age. At home, she worried, at work, she hummed.
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Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
Jane Smiley
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Jane Smiley
Creative Commons
Born:
September 26, 1949
(age 74)
Bio:
Jane Smiley is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres.
Known for:
Some Luck (2014)
A Thousand Acres (1991)
The Greenlanders (1988)
Horse Heaven (2000)
Early Warning (2015)
Most used words:
life
thinking
horse
chickens
people
time
writing
fact
novel
book
dickens
order
desire
point
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