Jane Smiley

It is neither floating nor springing. It is power without labor, thrust without force, the very opposite of any sort of aggression, the particular physics of his anatomy, the demonstration and the effect of his personality.

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

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.

Some days they would talk all morning about exactly how warm Heaven might be. It could not be warm enough so that souls went naked, or could it? If souls went naked, then why all the weaving, and if there was no weaving then how did souls occupy themselves?

All I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn’t forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can’t stand what you know. I resisted that reflex. That’s my sole, solitary, lonely accomplishment.

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

Shame is a distinct feeling. I couldn’t look at my hands around the coffee cup or hear my own laments without feeling appalled, wanting desperately to fall silent, grow smaller. More than that, I was uncomfortably conscious of my whole body, from the awkward way that the shafts of my hair were thrusting out of my scalp to my feet, which felt dirty as well as cold. Everywhere, I seemed to feel my skin from the inside, as if it now stood away from my flesh, separated by a millimeter of mortified space.

Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these goods in place. And others remarked to themselves how sweet these goods were, in spite of that, and saw that pleasure lost in every moment is pleasure lost forever.

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

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

Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had but actually you never know just by remembering how many there were to have faced.

We’re not going to be sad. We’re going to be angry until we die. It’s the only hope.