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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1a01b70 | but from this distance, the velvety reds, flashing yellows and glassy whites [of the roses] seemed to break up the light of the summer sun into its various elements and cast it back far more brilliantly than any other flower ever could, seemed not exactly of the earth, but of space and air itself. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 7373476 | who was wearing a very handsome | Jane Smiley | ||
| 34a562f | Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she'd ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn't very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). | Jane Smiley | ||
| 92fbbf0 | Her parents took her very seriously; she had trained them, with a combination of treats and punishments, to allow her to do as she pleased and express herself, and to pay attention to her opinions. Thanks | Jane Smiley | ||
| 5ef0247 | JOE COULDN'T STAND the noise. The giant room they | Jane Smiley | ||
| 0884794 | In truth Mr Jonas Silk was as niggardly as he was jealous, and my sister Beatrice had as much interest in Kansas as she did in the czar of all the Russias, and so my brother Mr. Horace Silk worked out his plans in a white heat of frustrated eagerness. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 8af5c90 | What Is Really Going On in Spain? was another. Who's the Boss? was about whether members of the | Jane Smiley | ||
| 55293b0 | Mary had nice clothes, too, ones she had worked hard for over the summer, | Jane Smiley | ||
| df8d640 | You don't make 'em trot for one thing and run for the other. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 491790e | Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew what to do with its sour fruit. | Jane Smiley | ||
| a4199dd | We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them. | Jane Smiley | ||
| e1ee491 | It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet. | jane smiley | ||
| 9f0e8e0 | he hadn't had her as a teacher, which meant that he could tell her what | Jane Smiley | ||
| 771e094 | Arthur said, You must know that you don't love children for being good or bad. I know you know that. Why do you love them? Because you do, said Arthur. Because they don't know what's coming and maybe you do. | children life | Jane Smiley | |
| 961b988 | After him came a cast of characters out of her worst nightmares--Linda Chavez, Arch Puddington, twenty others as bad, all of whom, she could imagine, had a secret password such as a derogatory remark about Toni Morrison, whom Margaret considered a goddess. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 5ee06cf | Rosie and Mary had taken only a 10 percentage of this privilege - they were three minutes late leaving their room and took the second bus that went past rather than the first just so they could feel themselves standing at a bus stop in Manhattan, New York, surrounded by people who were short, dark and voluble rather than tall, blond and silent. The fatal part was the bus they got on. They, of course stood, because they had been taught to do.. | midwesterners | Jane Smiley | |
| e8092b5 | Linda was just born when I had my first miscarriage, and for a while, six months maybe, the sight of those two babies, whom I had loved and cared for with real interest and satisfaction, affected me like a poison. All my tissues hurt when I saw them, when I saw Rose with them, as if my capillaries were carrying acid into the furthest reaches of my system. I was so jealous, and so freshly jealous every time I saw them, that I could hardly sp.. | Jane Smiley | ||
| cfdde08 | Hmmph, said Mrs. Walker, or rather, without speaking, she launched this hmmph into the air of the room and allowed it to float there. | Jane Smiley | ||
| c36f0fa | She said, "Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them." | Jane Smiley | ||
| 452090d | I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It's always the lunch line in ninth grade. Nakedness dreams are very common. I suppose they are. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 8b2fe1f | It is hard to know whether an air of self-confidence precedes or follows success. | Jane Smiley | ||
| d5c04d1 | We watched the swimmers and sunbathers and I thought about this. Had I faced all the facts? It seemed like I had, but actually, you never know, just by remembering, how many facts you were allowed to have faced. Your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction allowed you by others who've really faced the facts. The eerie feeling this thought gave me made me shiver in the hot wind. | Jane Smiley | ||
| f903415 | Sometimes these days Dean felt like picking up the phone and calling his buddy Michael Jordan and chortling with him over how he'd played Continental Dairy Industries off against National Milk, but of course he didn't have Michael's number. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 93df88a | So 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. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 163fe2c | It was not that he felt that the world would damage or hurt Frankie in any way, it was much more that there were plenty of things out in the world that Frankie would learn about, and that he would then have no scruples at all. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 07f4b9c | One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsion to tear up their clothes and braid them into rag rugs. | Jane Smiley | ||
| f6dfc28 | He was turning out to be one of those men whose interest diminished as they got to know you. You got into this pattern of trying to be interesting by revealing more and more of yourself, like a salesman unpacking his sample bag, but the man, though he looked like he was smiling and paying attention, was really shaking his head internally--not that, not that either, no I don't think so, not today. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 45dbe3b | She looked out the window of her office, feeling that she had passed through a doorway that she had never realized was there. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 9989576 | 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. We have to stand up to that, and say, at least to ourselves, that what he's done before is still with us, still right here in this room until there's true remorse. Nothing will be right until there's that." "He looks so, sort of, weakened." "W.. | family humiliation remorse repentance | Jane Smiley | |
| d38752d | He'd said, "Remember that Chinese curse, 'May you live in interesting times'? The dairy farmer's curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows." -- | Jane Smiley | ||
| 8bfad35 | and the horticulturalists really believed that gardening would save the world that agriculture was destroying. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 645140a | All those cows with the same pattern of black and white, all turning their heads at the same time, all mooing in unison (his first love was still cloning) and all feeling pregnant when they were not, didn't seem to be an image she could hold in her head along with the rest of what she knew about life. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 5caf247 | Joy had never before been to a university party where there were no drinks, and her immediate reaction was that she just couldn't find it, that there was a bar somewhere in the house where a nice young man in a white jacket was pouring out Bloody Marys, but that no one would tell her where it was. | Jane Smiley | ||
| c6c98c7 | Laura's gossip was redeemed by its lack of spite. She was warmly objective about every event, taking endless delight in action and complexity, as if she had been bed-ridden in a small windowless room for years and was just now discovering the dramatic possibilities of daily life. She sang Alice through the day. | Jane Smiley | ||
| e48d0c5 | Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 5f6050c | like a man who has jumped off a diving board, but then, through force of will, lowers himself inch by inch into the pool. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 493a695 | What do you think makes you start laughing and unable to stop? | Jane Smiley | ||
| 7230968 | Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren't any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, ready to eat, fuck, fetch, piss on the bushes. | Jane Smiley | ||
| d7b3f1a | DR. LIONEL GIFT IS in bed with Arlen Martin, billionaire, but only in the Washington, D.C., sense. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 8999fc5 | A girl who made no mistakes about the right shade of lipstick would always land on her feet. | Jane Smiley | ||
| c006452 | The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash berries hanging like embers in the general misty brown of the world. | Jane Smiley | ||
| 787f032 | 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? Which did not mean, | Jane Smiley | ||
| 48b8d18 | Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon. | Jane Smiley | ||
| baa6cad | but no matter how receptive his pretty and sweet speech therapist looked, no matter how softly and encouragingly she said, "Go ahead, try it. Say it," still, the sounds came out like mooing." | Jane Smiley |