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Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.

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
Odd
Looked
Gravestones
Poetry
Gravestone
Names
Avid
Literature
Seeker
Read
Dickens
Charles
Seekers

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Love is a general emotion. Marriage is exactingly specific.
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Hungry ears are sharp ones.
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There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.
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In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
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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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Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.
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Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community...
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I was an only child. I've known only children. From this experience, I do believe that the children should outnumber the parents.
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The thing about Republicans is that they don't care so much about respect, but they love fear, at least in others.
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you know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.
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My mom was paranoid about my safety.
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Writing novels is an essentially amateur activity.
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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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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.
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I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?
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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.
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The main thing about the novel that is totally fascinating: It's not possessed by the writer it's possessed by the reader.
Jane Smiley
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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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Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.
Jane Smiley
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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.
Jane Smiley