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Author: Jane Smiley
Quotes of Author: Jane Smiley
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  1. Jane Smiley _ A Thousand Acres

    Otherwise, my life passed in a blur, that blessing of urban routine. The sense of distinct events that is so inescapable on a farm, where every rainstorm is thick with odor and color, and usefulness and timing, where omens of prosperity or ruin to come are sought in every change, where any of the world's details may contain the one thing that above all else you will regret not knowing, this sense lifted off me. Maybe another way of saying it is that I forgot I was still alive.
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  2. Jane Smiley _ A Thousand Acres

    I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future.
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  3. Jane Smiley _ The Greenlanders

    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.
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  4. Jane Smiley _ A Thousand Acres

    Even in Minnesota, where the winter was a big topic of conversation and a permanent occasion for people's heroic self-regard, it was only winter on the highway a few hours out of the year. The rest of the time, traffic kept moving. Snow and rain were reduced to scenery nearly as much as any other kind of weather, something to look out the window at but nothing that hindered you. The
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  5. Jane Smiley _ A Thousand Acres

    However much these acres looked like a gift of nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church to pay our respects, not to give thanks.
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  6. Jane Smiley _ The Hillside

    cats swore that they had pretended to be domesticated to protect themselves-any cat who lived with a human did so under duress, and all cats escaped whenever they could.
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  7. Jane Smiley _ The Greenlanders

    So it was with Vigdis' neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbors had been summoned before the Thing on suspicion of hay stealing or sheep stealing, when anyone could see that the hay had only been used up, and the sheep had only been lost in the hills above the steading.
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  8. Jane Smiley _ The Greenlanders

    It was always and ever hard to tell with women why they chose one way and not another.
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  9. Jane Smiley _ The Greenlanders

    To bring him into such agonies as a man should never know, to deny him shrift, to tear his flesh shred from shred. And how will I ever be forgiven for such a lust as this?
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  10. Jane Smiley _ The Greenlanders

    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.
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  11. Jane Smiley _ The Greenlanders

    that there is such pleasure in enmity that after a while it cannot be left off even if one would will it. Another thing is also true, that when a quarrel is new, one's friends hold one back, and give cool advice, but when it is long-standing, folk put off its end and goad the rivals."
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  12. Jane Smiley _ The Greenlanders

    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.
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