Lee Smith Quotes

#1. Pearl is the only person I ever knew who said things like "paths in life" out loud.

Lee Smith

#2. People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.

Lee Smith

#3. If Strength comes through Suffering, why then I should be the strongest of all women, yet I am the weakest. God help me. Help me.

Lee Smith

#4. For many of us, especially women, the gap between what we want or need and what our society expects of us is wide indeed, and we spend out lives trying to negotiate it. Trying to balance work and family, responsibilities and desires, all that stuff. It is not easy.

Lee Smith

#5. What I didn't understand, all those years when I was waiting for my life to start, was that it had already started. I was already living it! Those were the most important years, and I didn't even know it.

Lee Smith

#6. And I belive I am too, and if you think that is awful, then you dont understand a thing.

Lee Smith

#7. But I would do it all again, every bit of it, I would lose him again just to have him again for an hour, for a minute, for even a second. I would do it all again just to see his face.

Lee Smith

#8. And are we not all "mere guests" upon this whirling earth?

Lee Smith

#9. It's true that when anyone dies, the other dead rise up abd die all over again.

Lee Smith

#10. Oh, I was young then, and I walked in my body like a Queen.

Lee Smith

#11. Now courting's a pleasure, and parting is grief, but a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief!

Lee Smith

#12. Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.

Lee Smith

#13. God may forgive you if He chooses, but not I. Au revoir.

Lee Smith

#14. Nothing is ever over, nothing is ever ended, and worlds open up within the world we know.

Lee Smith

#15. I like a book. I like to read for four hours at a stretch. I think very few are the young people who are even capable of reading for four hours at a stretch, because it's such a bizarre thing for them to do. I am mourning this.

Lee Smith

#16. I want to be Tragedy, I want to be Juliet, I want to be Romeo. Thus with a kiss I die.

Lee Smith

#17. The state of my nerves precludes any more active an existence

Lee Smith

#18. People are so busy positioning themselves before the screen and talking on the damn cellphones, communicating, that we're not reading, and in fact we're not really communicating, either. We're not talking to each other. There's just all these screens and wires and technology in between.

Lee Smith

#19. For once I am living my life rather than watching it pass in review.

Lee Smith

#20. I have always been interested in religion, especially in forms of ecstatic religion, where people are touched directly by the Spirit and go completely out of themselves.

Lee Smith

#21. An image comes to Russell: we drift through the world like dandelion puffs on the wind, we spread our seed and disappear, and the world doesn't care. The world doesn't even notice. The world is not about us. Finally

Lee Smith

#22. I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

Lee Smith

#23. I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other.

Lee Smith

#24. This point I could not show myself, of course, or all would

Lee Smith

#25. For in the world of the mad, time is not a continuum but a fluid, shifting place, relative to nothing.

Lee Smith

#26. I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology.

Lee Smith

#27. Then I started crying for it seemed to me then that life is nothing but people leaving.

Lee Smith

#28. I had always dreamed of living in Chapel Hill. When I was a college student at Hollins University in Virginia, I came down to Chapel Hill for summer school and just loved it.

Lee Smith

#29. They say experience is the best teacher, but I'll be damned if I know what it teaches you.

Lee Smith

#30. Oh, if our children actually knew how much we love them, they'd never be able to hit any of these balls, they'd be simply immobilized by the force of it, by the awful force of our love.

Lee Smith

#31. To much has happened too fast Dear Diary. What I want is for nothing to happen at all.
I don't even want good things anymore. I just want nothing.

Lee Smith

#32. Perhaps any life is such: different stories like different strands, each distinct in itself, each true, yet wound together to form one rope, one life.

Lee Smith

#33. Not how much, but how well, is our motto.

Lee Smith

#34. Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end?

Lee Smith