Jane Smiley Quotes

There are always two or three or four sides to every story.

People tell stories and it's up to those who listen whether to believe or not." "Shouldn't the storyteller believe it." "The storyteller should tell it.

History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

Amelia shows that it's not what happens in life that counts, but rather how you frame it, how you talk about it.

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth.

The word “History” is mostly made up of the word “Story”.

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

History is about who tells it.

I think the benefit of being a writer is that I'm looking for the subtext on the page, because all good writing has subtext. And as a writer, you look at the big scope of things, the big story, rather than just your individual story line, because I think it's important to know what you're in and how you fit into it.

We are surrounded by story.

I do not deny that what happened to us is a thing worth laughing at. But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

We don’t attach to things; we attach to our stories about them.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

It's the frames which make some things important and some things forgotten. It's all only frames from which the content rises.

I feel like I've been blessed. I see the world through stories.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

Everything you look at can become a fairy tale and you can get a story from everything you touch.