Lee Smith Quotes & Sayings

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

I think as the world changes, we have to keep up. We have to note what is happening, and I think writing has always had a powerful corrective influence and possibility. We have to write about what's good, and we also have to write about parts of our culture that are not good, that are not working out. I think it takes a new eye. — Lee Smith

This point I could not show myself, of course, or all would — Lee Smith

Pearl is the only person I ever knew who said things like "paths in life" out loud. — Lee Smith

I write about people in small towns; I don't write about people living in big cities. My kind of storytelling depends upon people that have time to talk to each other. — Lee Smith

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

For once I am living my life rather than watching it pass in review. — Lee Smith

I had always dreamed of living in Chapel Hill. When I was a college student at Hollins University in Virginia, I came down to Chapel Hill for summer school and just loved it. — Lee Smith

It's true that when anyone dies, the other dead rise up abd die all over again. — Lee Smith

Nothing is ever over, nothing is ever ended, and worlds open up within the world we know. — Lee Smith

An image comes to Russell: we drift through the world like dandelion puffs on the wind, we spread our seed and disappear, and the world doesn't care. The world doesn't even notice. The world is not about us. Finally — Lee Smith

God may forgive you if He chooses, but not I. Au revoir. — Lee Smith

Born Virginia Marshall but nicknamed Gig, my mother was a home economics teacher who had come all the way across the whole state of Virginia, from her home on the Eastern Shore to our little Appalachian coal town to marry my daddy, Ernest Smith, whose family had lived in these mountains for generations. — Lee Smith

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

Now courting's a pleasure, and parting is grief, but a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief! — Lee Smith

The state of my nerves precludes any more active an existence — Lee Smith

They say experience is the best teacher, but I'll be damned if I know what it teaches you. — Lee Smith

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

For they was never a young man yet who don't want to go out and right a wrong, or kill a man, or have to do something to earn his right to what is there for the taking, all along. Only he don't think he can ask, nor take, without earning it. Without no pain. Oftener than not, a young man's a regular fool. — Lee Smith

Certainly I was a very religious child, a deeply weird and very emotional child, an only child with lots of imaginary friends and a very active imagination. I loved Sunday school and Bible camp and all that. I had my own white Bible with Jesus' words printed in red in the text; I even spoke at youth revivals. — Lee Smith

Oh, I was young then, and I walked in my body like a Queen. — Lee Smith

Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end? — Lee Smith

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

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

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

For many of us, especially women, the gap between what we want or need and what our society expects of us is wide indeed, and we spend out lives trying to negotiate it. Trying to balance work and family, responsibilities and desires, all that stuff. It is not easy. — Lee Smith

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

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

I was raised in a little church, the Grundy Methodist Church, that was very straight-laced, but I had a friend whose mother spoke in tongues. I was just wild for this family. My own parents were older, and they were so over-protective. I just loved the 'letting go' that would happen when I went to church with my friend. — Lee Smith

I am so sorry to see the state of reading in such decline. I think it says something really scary and terrible about us as a culture. I think it does have to do with everyone's total global embrace of technology. — Lee Smith

People are so busy positioning themselves before the screen and talking on the damn cellphones, communicating, that we're not reading, and in fact we're not really communicating, either. We're not talking to each other. There's just all these screens and wires and technology in between. — Lee Smith

For in the world of the mad, time is not a continuum but a fluid, shifting place, relative to nothing. — 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

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

Not how much, but how well, is our motto. — Lee Smith

I have always been interested in religion, especially in forms of ecstatic religion, where people are touched directly by the Spirit and go completely out of themselves. — Lee Smith

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

I want to be Tragedy, I want to be Juliet, I want to be Romeo. Thus with a kiss I die. — Lee Smith

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

And are we not all "mere guests" upon this whirling earth? — Lee Smith

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

Then I started crying for it seemed to me then that life is nothing but people leaving. — Lee Smith

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say. — Lee Smith

I like a book. I like to read for four hours at a stretch. I think very few are the young people who are even capable of reading for four hours at a stretch, because it's such a bizarre thing for them to do. I am mourning this. — Lee Smith