Quotes For Smiley

#1. poking around in this dump, as it would be

Jane Smiley

#2. That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it.

John Le Carre

#3. To be happy, drop the words 'if only' and substitute instead the words 'next time'.

Smiley Blanton

#4. 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.

Jane Smiley

#5. The school crossing guard is a zombie?" screams the youngest Smiley. Then she starts crying. "I hugged her once, Mommy! Am I gonna turn into a zombie, too?" "Take it easy, dear," says Aunt Smiley. "It's just a joke. I think. Right, Jamie?

James Patterson

#6. There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.

Jane Smiley

#7. This administration and these folk who run Washington are no more interested in our welfare and our well being than the man on the moon. And we have got to start taking our destiny into our hands.

Tavis Smiley

#8. I grew. Going outside my comfort zone is a big one for me.

Tavis Smiley

#9. Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

Jane Smiley

#10. A sense of curiosity is nature's original school of education.

Smiley Blanton

#11. Competition's always been a product of American lifestyle

Tavis Smiley

#12. Walking a short way back along the embankment, almost to where the cross stood, Smiley took another look at the bridge, as if to establish whether anything had changed, but clearly it had not, and though the wind appeared a little stronger, the snow was still swirling in all directions.

John Le Carre

#13. Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

Jane Smiley

#14. When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you.

Jane Smiley

#15. I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.

Jane Smiley

#16. We think of - there are too many wars, of course, in the world as we speak, but my read on this suggests to me that water is going to be the resource into the future that we're really - that countries, nations, are going to be fighting for control over.

Tavis Smiley

#17. I'm a really smiley person, so I've just learned when I'm doing my own makeup, I have to make sure it's smile ready and not too heavy. As amazing as the Victoria Beckham pout is for photos, I just can't do it!

Rosario Dawson

#18. eidetic memory. What else any of it meant to

Jane Smiley

#19. Gossip. The more you talk about why people do things, the more ideas you have about how the world works.

Jane Smiley

#20. I'm happy for the kid and everything, but how the fuck does Lio get a friend before me? I live here.
'I told you I could do it ' Lio IMs me. I want to rip out that smiley's eyes.

Hannah Moskowitz

#21. 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

#22. Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.

Jane Smiley

#23. I suspected that there were things he knew that I had been waiting all my life to learn.

Jane Smiley

#24. If we are deprived of our just due, we naturally experience emotions of anger.

Smiley Blanton

#25. Do you think I would want to live under a government that you ran or set up? It's all very nice to say you're an anarchist, but you only want anarchy for yourself. For the rest of us, you want to make sure we do what you say, think how you think, and remember you're the boss.

Jane Smiley

#26. If I was on an island, just for melody, I would take albums by the Stones, AC/DC and the Beach Boys' Smiley Smile.

Steven Tyler

#27. I'm a natural novelist. I'm interested in the person and the group, and how they mesh. And one of the ways I don't want them to mesh is for the person to be subsumed into the group.

Jane Smiley

#28. I don't like smiley pictures. A smile is a defense mechanism. It says, You can't have the real me but here's my smile. You get closer to the real person when they stop smiling.

Chris Killip

#29. Since time immemorial wise people have been saying that all comparisons are odious. When we compare, we set up a winner-loser dynamic. If my crisis is greater than yours, then yours is belittled and insignificant. I say that's nonsense. Each crisis has its own power, its own unique reality.

Tavis Smiley

#30. Jamestown changed the world in many ways, but perhaps it shaped our nation most profoundly the day Africans arrived. I can't think of a more relevant place to talk about the issues facing our community today than the place where African culture became American culture.

Tavis Smiley

#31. I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

Jane Smiley

#32. I thought about having sex with Jess Clark and I could feel my flesh turn electric at these thoughts, cold feel sensation gather at my nipples, could feel my vagina relax and open, could feel my lips and fingertips grow sensitive enough to know their own shapes.

Jane Smiley

#33. I am not a birch.

Santino Hassell

#34. Regardless of your race, religion or political affiliation, never hesitate to question those in authority.

Tavis Smiley

#35. Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family

Jane Smiley

#36. Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up.

Jane Smiley

#37. rain or snow. Mama worried and Papa was impressed;

Jane Smiley

#38. Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

Jane Smiley

#39. She had felt a surge of fear so strong

Jane Smiley

#40. If I knew how to operate a DVR, you'd find episodes of 'The Tavis Smiley Show,' 'Democracy Now!' and lots of stuff from TV Land. What you can find now on my Hulu account are Korean soap operas, 'Grey's Anatomy' and films from the Criterion collection.

T'Keyah Crystal Keymah

#41. Horse racing is really much more intimidating than anything having to do with literature. When I had horses at the racetrack, I would wake up in terror in a way that I would never wake up while working on a novel.

Jane Smiley

#42. I would like to do some serious drama. I really connect with emotional characters who have struggles and a lot of emotion and colors. I don't really want to do anything smiley and cheesy; it's not really my personality when I'm working.

Sarah Hay

#43. Christians have always been fodder for comedians who have tended to portray them as anoraks - slightly clammy, beatifically smiley dullards with barely a personality between them.

Jo Brand

#44. Redound to the university's professed goal of excellence

Jane Smiley

#45. It didn't occur to us. We had swum in the ocean of religion all our lives and not gotten wet.

Jane Smiley

#46. not to borrow trouble by worrying about it.

Jane Smiley

#47. When I'm at the premiere and I see the film in its entirety, I forget plot, I forget the story, I forget what my character goes through, because I really do just let it go.

Tavis Smiley

#48. Your sons weren't made to like you. That's what grandchildren are for.

Jane Smiley

#49. NOW CAME OUR INTRODUCTION to Smiley, former rodeo clown, whose name outside the costume might as well have been Cranky as Hell.

Ivan Doig

#50. She liked him. She liked the feeling of liking him. She felt light and smiley and too full of excitement to think of anything else.

Freya North

#51. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. Doc

Tavis Smiley

#52. I love to write about sex. You just have to make it idiosyncratic. You have to have a strong comprehension of your characters, and write it from their point of view. It's really fun. It's not erotic.

Jane Smiley

#53. Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake it for the genuine article.

Nathan Poe

#54. The brave view is that talking it out helps work it out. Maybe the realistic view is that talking it out inflames the issues further. But that is America, especially these days.

Jane Smiley

#55. You know that the urge for revenge is a fact of marital life.

Jane Smiley

#56. 'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.

Jane Smiley

#57. There is something I have noticed about desire, that it opens the eyes and strikes them blind at the same time.

Jane Smiley

#58. Good intentions are wicked! As far as I can see, all they lead to are lies and delusions.

Jane Smiley

#59. A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements - the lover, the beloved, and the adventures they have together.

Jane Smiley

#60. Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states.

Jane Smiley

#61. There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.

Jane Smiley

#62. Engagement pictures made me want to vomit - especially when they were taken on railroad tracks. I always pictured Thomas the Train rolling over them, his smiley blue face beaded with their blood.

Tarryn Fisher

#63. Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

Jane Smiley

#64. Take your focus off how others see you. Cease being obsessed with the need to impress your friends and your foes. Keep your concern on the vision you see in the mirror. Don't allow the approval of others to obstruct your view of you.

Tavis Smiley

#65. Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.

John Le Carre

#66. With any novel that you begin, you can't foresee how difficult or easy it's going to be, and you can't really prepare yourself. You just have a take it one step at a time and know that it's all right to keep going - you can always fix it.

Jane Smiley

#67. We knew right off how to think of them but not precisely how to feel about them.

Jane Smiley

#68. A lot of people use a smiley face when they write letters. But it's this huge insane compulsion, like 'I'm happy! I swear!' I'm not buying it.

Nate Lowman

#69. The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

Jane Smiley

#70. said, looking for a job on Broadway.

Jane Smiley

#71. Progressivism is usually seen as a stepping back from individualism into a progressive community.

Jane Smiley

#72. 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.

Jane Smiley

#73. Nobody can be all smiley all the time, but having a good positive attitude isn't something to shrug off.

Yogi Berra

#74. A novelist has two lives
a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

Jane Smiley

#75. I knew it wasn't good when it happened. It's definitely scary. Every now and then, something brings you back to reality.

Justin Smiley

#76. Another thing he told his customers was that one of the great accounting unknowns of the modern age was how to value knowledge. It was an exciting field.

Jane Smiley

#77. Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

Jane Smiley

#78. who was wearing a very handsome

Jane Smiley

#79. Her stare was like a small room he couldn't get out of.

Jane Smiley

#80. I don't know - is everything the U.S. does a shocking embarrassment?

Jane Smiley

#81. 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.

Jane Smiley

#82. Troubled times do call for troubled songs, songs that unsettle our souls and our spirits unapologetically.

Tavis Smiley

#83. Before novels written by women were relegated to their own 'genre,' I was introduced to Jane Smiley by a dear professor who raised my awareness of what female authors were bringing to the table of contemporary fiction.

Emma McLaughlin

#84. Other Definitions of Worry Anxiety is the great modern plague. But faith can cure it.

Smiley Blanton

#85. If your happy and you know it a smiley face will surely show it.

David Chiles

#86. Americans took a great deal too much credit for creating wealth, when most of the time they had really just been living off natural bounty unprecedented in the history of the world.

Jane Smiley

#87. I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning-to-drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.

Jane Smiley

#88. Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

Jane Smiley

#89. Girls are small and polite and smiley. They wear dresses and their hair is long and it's pulled into shapes behind their heads or on either side.

Patrick Ness

#90. All of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their fullest extent ... And every life must be chalked up at least a partial failure when it does not succeed in reaching its inherent destiny.

Smiley Blanton

#91. The fundamental condition of childhood is powerlessness.

Jane Smiley

#92. A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

Jane Smiley

#93. Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Jane Smiley

#94. Hands behind his head. He took another deep breath. The whore

Jane Smiley

#95. Smiley was the oddest. You thought, to look at him, that he couldn't cross the road alone, but you might as well have offered protection to a hedgehog.

John Le Carre

#96. In some states, not even 50 percent of black boys finish high school.

Tavis Smiley

#97. Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.

Jane Smiley

#98. I'm not strange to myself, but I realize that I contrast with others fairly sharply.

Jane Smiley

#99. Live just because or live your life for a cause

Tavis Smiley

#100. A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

Jane Smiley