# Jane Smiley

- Quotes: 44
- Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley

## Books

- [A Thousand Acres](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/a-thousand-acres.md) — 14 quotes
- [A Year at the Races](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/a-year-at-the-races.md) — 4 quotes
- [Charles Dickens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/charles-dickens.md) — 2 quotes
- [Golden Age](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/golden-age.md) — 3 quotes
- [Moo](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/moo.md) — 5 quotes
- [The Age of Grief](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/the-age-of-grief.md) — 6 quotes
- [The Greenlanders](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/the-greenlanders.md) — 10 quotes

## Recently added quotes

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/a-year-at-the-races/what-truly-horsey.md)

> 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?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/moo/how-could-she.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/moo/it-was-the.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/moo/eavesdropping-is-a-habit.md)

> The thick, sugary covering of the snow.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/moo/the-thick-sugary.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/charles-dickens/dickens-spoke-in-a-new.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/golden-age/she-said-some.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/a-year-at-the-races/fascination-with-horses.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/moo/she-did-not.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/charles-dickens/the-novel-is-above.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/golden-age/two-she-thought.md)

> Failure was startling, really. So startling that I hardly noticed it at all.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jane-smiley/a-year-at-the-races/failure-was-startling.md)