Jane Smiley

It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success.

Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repellent it is, they are glad enough to welcome it.

And then he saw what he was, an old man, ready to die, pressed against the Greenland earth, as small as an ash berry on the face of a mountain, and he did the only thing that men can do when they know themselves, which was to weep and weep and weep.

Daddy thinks history starts fresh every day, every minute, that time itself begins with the feelings he’s having right now. That’s how he keeps betraying us, why he roars at us with such conviction.

I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.

This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.

Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world-in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion.

They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up.

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

Even though I felt her presence, I also felt the habitual fruitlessness of thinking about her. Her images, partly memories of her, partly memories of photos I had seen of her, yielded no new answers to old mysteries.

Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who’ve really faced the facts.

This is my thought, that for every soul, something must come to pass, and for everything that does come to pass, every soul can imagine many things that might have come to pass, all of them less evil than what actually fell out. Folk must have something to think on, or they would be unable to hope for Heaven or remember Paradise.