Jane Smiley Quotes

From the very dawn of time until now and well into the future... human-animal companionship is at the very core of our instincts not only for mutual survival, but mutually rewarding relationships.

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.

There is a scarcity of friendship, but not of friends.

Dogs give us something just as we give something to them.

Straight men just can't imagine the bliss of being in a relationship with someone who finds farting as funny as they do.

If a dog doesn't put you first where are you both? In what relation? A dog needs God. It lives by your glances, your wishes. It even shares your humor. This happens about the fifth year. If it doesn't happen you are only keeping an animal.

But you are alone. Yet I never tell what you are. And if your face lights up my world as no other can - well, this feeling too, when viewed as the mere psychologist has to view it, appears to be simply what all the other friends report about their friends.

Friendship is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is because mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.

Love is a positive, symbiotic, reciprocal flow between two or more entities.

I felt such a deep connection with dolphins. I felt like they were the only ones who understood me.

Animals represent the abstract notion of acceptance. Living with these funny creatures - you kind of have to accept them. It's like a test in a way.

Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can't show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn't matter whose body is whose.

I used to be a keen rider. Sometimes I could sense what a horse liked or preferred to do.

The relationships we have with dogs seem simple enough and often are taken for granted. But these relationships can be deep and mysterious, and not at all simple.

Patch was in my life for a reason. I needed him. We were two halves of the same whole.

I think on a day-to-day basis, what attracts us in coexisting with another living, evolving thing, is that you have a relationship that's different than with a piece of furniture. We experience the cycle of life through these other beings.

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

She had never been so close to anybody. It was as if they were one being, together, not predator and prey, but partners in a dance.

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals.

I believe that love is the main key to open the doors to the "growth" of man. Love and union with someone or something outside of oneself, union that allows one to put oneself into relationship with others, to feel one with others, without limiting the sense of integrity and independence. Love is a productive orientation for which it is essential that there be present at the same time: concern, responsibility, and respect for and knowledge of the object of the union.

We are not, and never need be, alone.

Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.