People
Jane Smiley

Jane Smiley photo

Jane Smiley Quotes

Total quotes: 3

Jane Smiley photo

Jane Smiley

Birthname

Birthday: September 26, 1949

Birthplace: Los Angeles, California, United States

Educated At: University Of Iowa, Vassar College

Nationality: United States Of America

Occupations: Literary Critic, Novelist, Writer, Journalist

Total quotes: 3

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

— Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

Tagged: Reading, Books, Happiness

“I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.”

— Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres: A Novel

Tagged: depressed, Life, careless

“Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness ‘is the most mysterious aspect of our lives’; philosophers ‘have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.’

I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by ‘consciousness’ I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.”

— Jane Smiley, Enlightenment on Your iPhone

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