Quote

Many said that now there was no hope of salvation, for a man might do anything and be in the wrong. There was no way to tell. It was better to stay on the steading and mind the cows and be content with such days as are left to one and cease to wonder about life everlasting.

Jane Smiley

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Jane Smiley
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: January 1
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
LA
California
Jane Graves Smiley
Men
Left
Cease
Life
Tell
Content
Anything
Salvation
Better
Stay
Might
Days
Many
Wonder
Mind
Wrong
Everlasting
Way
Hope
Cows

More quotes by Jane Smiley

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Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.
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If there's anything Trollope novels always take seriously, it is money - how it flows from one character to another, how it is managed, who has it, who deserves it, and what it means to a character, male or female.
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I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.
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Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.
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Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.
Jane Smiley
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Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.
Jane Smiley
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Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.
Jane Smiley
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I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.
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The essence of charity ... was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted.
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The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
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In every society, the artists will be the ones who set themselves up as contrary to whatever the society expects.
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Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.
Jane Smiley
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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
Jane Smiley
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Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.
Jane Smiley
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English majors understand human nature better than economists do.
Jane Smiley
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All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.
Jane Smiley
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Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family
Jane Smiley
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Novelists never have to footnote.
Jane Smiley
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Respect and fear are two different things.
Jane Smiley
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If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.
Jane Smiley