Moo Quotes

“like a man who has jumped off a diving board, but then, through force of will, lowers himself inch by inch into the pool.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Don’t you want to know what happened?” Carol turned to look at her and put her hands on her hips. She said, “No, I don’t, because I don’t want you making a story out of it, because as soon as you make a story out of it, then it keeps happening every time you tell it, and if you make a good story out of it, then you’re gonna want to tell it, so don’t bother.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Almonds. Apricots. Avocadoes. Some peaches I don't know. Grapefruit. Lemones. Probably oranges.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“What you saw was what you got, and she did not believe, as some of the other girls said, that the boys at the parties were separate from some sober incarnation of the same boys.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“One signal conversation, which she had lingered near for ten minutes, between two woman German professors, had concerned a support group they both belonged to for people with an overwhelming compulsion to tear up their clothes and braid them into rag rugs.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Dean Harstad had unbounded patience, the very patience that drove Chairman X bananas, patience as a weapon.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“...and the thick, sugary covering of the snow...”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink? Which did not mean,”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Hmmph, said Mrs. Walker, or rather, without speaking, she launched this hmmph into the air of the room and allowed it to float there.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“The plant succession that had begun in March with snowdrops and early crocuses would soon flicker out in a blaze of orange chrysanthemums and show its last pinpoints of color in bittersweet and ash berries hanging like embers in the general misty brown of the world.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Mary had nice clothes, too, ones she had worked hard for over the summer,”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“In this flirtation he was conducting, he had had to rely entirely on his personality, never a good idea.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“A girl who made no mistakes about the right shade of lipstick would always land on her feet.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can’t get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“and the horticulturalists really believed that gardening would save the world that agriculture was destroying.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“What do you think makes you start laughing and unable to stop?”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren’t any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, ready to eat, fuck, fetch, piss on the bushes.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“All those cows with the same pattern of black and white, all turning their heads at the same time, all mooing in unison (his first love was still cloning) and all feeling pregnant when they were not, didn’t seem to be an image she could hold in her head along with the rest of what she knew about life.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“She chewed the tender meat and sucked out the juices and felt the sauce coat her tongue and roll down her throat. After that, he looked still better. Another”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“but no matter how receptive his pretty and sweet speech therapist looked, no matter how softly and encouragingly she said, “Go ahead, try it. Say it,” still, the sounds came out like mooing.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“She looked out the window of her office, feeling that she had passed through a doorway that she had never realized was there.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“After him came a cast of characters out of her worst nightmares—Linda Chavez, Arch Puddington, twenty others as bad, all of whom, she could imagine, had a secret password such as a derogatory remark about Toni Morrison, whom Margaret considered a goddess.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Sometimes these days Dean felt like picking up the phone and calling his buddy Michael Jordan and chortling with him over how he’d played Continental Dairy Industries off against National Milk, but of course he didn’t have Michael’s number.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“He was turning out to be one of those men whose interest diminished as they got to know you. You got into this pattern of trying to be interesting by revealing more and more of yourself, like a salesman unpacking his sample bag, but the man, though he looked like he was smiling and paying attention, was really shaking his head internally—not that, not that either, no I don’t think so, not today.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“DR. LIONEL GIFT IS in bed with Arlen Martin, billionaire, but only in the Washington, D.C., sense.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“He’d said, “Remember that Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’? The dairy farmer’s curse is, may you have an interesting herd of cows.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo

“Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.”
― Jane Smiley, Moo