Jane Smiley Quotes

Life would be so wonderful if we only knew what to do with it.

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.

An intimate core of my being recognizes that there is nothing in me that can go on: there is no spark; there is no infestation of vaporous miasma that has the capacity to continue, and there is nothing in me that wishes to continue. This moment is, for me, all that there is, and I'm willing to accept it. I'm a worm; I have no soul.

My search not only failed, but I convinced myself that all those who had searched like myself had failed also, and come like me to the despairing conviction that the only absolute knowledge man can possess is this—that life is without a meaning.

Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God?

She said she was neither happy nor unhappy, and that was why she couldn't go on. Each person knows the extent of their own suffering, or the total absence of meaning in their lives.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

Life and hope must cease together.

When you have understood that nothing is, that things do not even deserve the status of appearances, you no longer need to be saved, you are saved, and miserable forever.

I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?

But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.

What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?

Maybe you'll get lucky." I said bleakly, lurching on my feet. "Maybe I'll get hit by a truck on my way back.

What hope is there?” I asked. “If even angels fall, what hope is there for the rest of us?” “There isn’t,” he said. “We’re on our own. And we have to make the choices we think are best for our own survival.

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

Be still my tongue, for i know not what to say; My life is lived in darkness and here i will remain.

I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.

The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.

It may all end tomorrow, or it could go on forever (in which case I'm doomed).

In our world no one ever knows what to do, and everyone's just as clueless and full of crap as everyone else, and you have to figure it all out by yourself. And even after you've figured it out and done it, you'll never know whether you were right or wrong. You'll never know if you put the ring in the right volcano, or if things might have gone better if you hadn't.

Despair ... is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat.

There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?