I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of lifes mystery and unpredictability, of lifes generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation. – Jane Smiley
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely. – Jane Smiley
I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures. – Jane Smiley
If you dont die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young. – Anne Lamott
And now it has risen above the massive and lofty tree, and throws its pleasant shadow down upon the earth—pleasant shadow that paces along the meadows, leaving behind a greater brilliancy on tree, and grass, and hedge, and flower than what, for a moment, it had eclipsed. – William Smith, Gravenhurst, or Thoughts on Good and Evil, 1862