Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres (1991)

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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.

Jane Smiley
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
How will you know a good farmer when you meet him? He will not ask you for any favors.

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

Jane Smiley
The one thing... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.

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

Jane Smiley
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.

Jane Smiley
Everything is toxic. That's the point. You can't avoid toxins. Thinking you can is just another symptom of the toxic overload stage.

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.

Jane Smiley