Lee Smith > Quotes

“And are we not all “mere guests” upon this whirling earth?”
― Lee Smith, Guests on Earth

“What I didn't understand, all those years when I was waiting for my life to start, was that it had already started. I was already living it! Those were the most important years, and I didn't even know it.”
― Lee Smith

“But I would do it all again, every bit of it, I would lose him again just to have him again for an hour, for a minute, for even a second. I would do it all again just to see his face.”
― Lee Smith, On Agate Hill

“Myself I love a thunderstorm better than anything. Sometimes I will run to the top of the hill to whirl around and around on my Indian Rock in the wind, it is like a dance I can not stop. The smell of the lightning goes into your nose and down your whole body. Old Bess says if you get hit by lightning yet live you will have special powers, well I could use some of those. So I don't care if I get hit or not.”
― Lee Smith, On Agate Hill

“Oh, I was young then, and I walked in my body like a Queen.”
― Lee Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies

“If Strength comes through Suffering, why then I should be the strongest of all women, yet I am the weakest. God help me. Help me.”
― Lee Smith, On Agate Hill

“People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones.”
― Lee Smith, On Agate Hill

“Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end?”
― Lee Smith, Guests on Earth

“The state of my nerves precludes any more active an existence”
― Lee Smith, Family Linen

“They say experience is the best teacher, but I'll be damned if I know what it teaches you.”
― Lee Smith, Oral History

“Oh, if our children actually knew how much we love them, they’d never be able to hit any of these balls, they’d be simply immobilized by the force of it, by the awful force of our love.”
― Lee Smith, The Last Girls

“Oh I know what they say about us in town, and I say, the hell with them! I tell you, I don't give a damn. I have got to be an old woman in the twinkling of an eye, and it is sort of a relief, I can tell you. I do what I want to now. Last week I traded all our eggs for ice cream at Holden's Grocery. Now that I have shrunk down little as a child, I figure I might as well act like one. I don't care. I like ice cream. Juney does too. We like to put bourbon in it, and make ourselves a milkshake.”
― Lee Smith, On Agate Hill

“For once I am living my life rather than watching it pass in review.”
― Lee Smith, Oral History

“Perhaps any life is such: different stories like different strands, each distinct in itself, each true, yet wound together to form one rope, one life.”
― Lee Smith, Guests on Earth

“It's true that when anyone dies, the other dead rise up abd die all over again.”
― Lee Smith, The Last Girls

“Then I started crying for it seemed to me then that life is nothing but people leaving.”
― Lee Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies

“Now courting’s a pleasure, and parting is grief, but a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief!”
― Lee Smith, Guests on Earth

“Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, "I write because I want more than one life.”
― Lee Smith, Dimestore: A Writer's Life

“Suddenly, lots of things of my own life occurred to me for the first time as stories: my great-granddaddy's 'other family' in West Virginia; Hardware Breeding, who married his wife Beulah, four times; how my Uncle Vern taught my daddy to drink good liquor in a Richmond hotel; how I got saved at the tent revival; John Hardin's hanging in the courthouse square; how Petey Chaney rode the flood; the time Mike Holland and I went to the serpent handling-church in Jolo; the murder Daddy saw when he was a boy, out riding his little pony - and never told...
I started to write these stories down. Many years later, I'm still at it. And it's a funny thing: Though I have spent my most of my working life in universities, though I live in piedmont North Carolina now and eat pasta and drive a Subaru, the stories that present themselves to me as worth the telling are often those somehow connected to that place and those people. The mountains that used to imprison me have become my chosen stalking ground.”
― Lee Smith, Dimestore: A Writer's Life

“And I belive I am too, and if you think that is awful, then you dont understand a thing.”
― Lee Smith

“Simply to line up words one after another upon a page is to create some order where it did not exist, to give a recognizable shape to the chaos of our lives. Writing cannot bring our loved ones back, but it can sometimes fix them in our fleeting memories as they were in life, and it can always help us make it through the night.”
― Lee Smith, Dimestore: A Writer's Life

“Heyday, now that is a funny word ain't it? Part of a heyday is, you don't never know you are having yourself one till later when it's all over with, long gone.”
― Lee Smith, On Agate Hill

“It is a funny thing but you can actually see improved mental health in the eyes,”
― Lee Smith, Guests on Earth

“...for in the world of the mad, time is not a continuum but a fluid, shifting place, relative to nothing.”
― Lee Smith, Guests on Earth

“To much has happened too fast Dear Diary. What I want is for nothing to happen at all.
I don't even want good things anymore. I just want nothing.”
― Lee Smith, On Agate Hill

“I had before me an object lesson, I thought: two ways to face the world. One way as embodied by this old woman—simple, unassuming, a kind of peasant dignity, a naturalness inherent in her every move. The other, exemplified by the girl—smartness, sophistication, veneer without substance. I was conscious that I have now opted for the old woman’s way, have thrown in my lot with a creature I would have jeered at a year ago. My present trip to the mountains is indeed a trip to that wellspring of naturalness she symbolized. And I admired my choice: the correct choice, the only choice for a sensitive and moral man in my dilemma.”
― Lee Smith, Oral History

“Away acrost his valley he sees Black Mountain rising jagged to the sky...and if he looks to the left on past it, he sees all the furtherest ranges, line on line. Purple and blue and blue again and smoky until you can't tell the mountains apart from the sky. Lord, it'll make a man think something, seeing that. It'll make a man think deep.”
― Lee Smith, Oral History

“In the parlance of today, our family was dysfunctional (is any family not?) I would never become an angel, or even a saint. Instead I would grow up wild, marry young, and settle down. We'd have two boys, forming our own dysfunctional family. We'd do the best we could. Then we'd divorce, and I'd feel "kindly nervous" myself. I'd remarry. I'd try like crazy. (We all do, don't we? We try like crazy.) My new husband and I would form our new, blended dysfunctional family.”
― Lee Smith, Dimestore: A Writer's Life

“I guess I have realized that we don’t live forever, and that the only time to do what we really want to do is now. This is the thing about a parent’s death—especially the second parent’s death— suddenly there is no other person standing between you and the great beyond, that darkness, the grave. I know I sound morbid, but it has been such an illuminating insight for me that I have to share it with you. Listen: the time is now. We are the next in line.”
― Lee Smith, The Christmas Letters

“This reminds me of something funny Mama said the last time she came for a visit. I had taken her and the girls to an early morning swim meet, picking up some coffee and bagels on the way. Mama didn’t say a thing when I bought the food, but the funniest look came over her face when she bit into her bagel. “Well!” she said. “Whoever thinks this is good has clearly never tasted a biscuit!”
― Lee Smith, The Christmas Letters