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1 " 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
2 " God may forgive you if He chooses, but not I. Au revoir. "
3 " And are we not all “mere guests” upon this whirling earth? "
― Lee Smith , Guests on Earth
4 " They say experience is the best teacher, but I'll be damned if I know what it teaches you. "
― Lee Smith , Oral History
5 " ...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. "
6 " I want to be Tragedy, I want to be Juliet, I want to be Romeo. Thus with a kiss I die. "
7 " 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. "
8 " People can act so nice, bringing you food and all, but in the end they are nothing but buzzards. Waiting to pick your bones. "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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. "
11 " 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. "
12 " 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
13 " Oh, I was young then, and I walked in my body like a Queen. "
― Lee Smith , Fair and Tender Ladies
14 " The state of my nerves precludes any more active an existence "
― Lee Smith , Family Linen
15 " 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. "
16 " 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
17 " Is any story not always the narrator's story, in the end? "
18 " Now courting’s a pleasure, and parting is grief, but a false-hearted lover is worse than a thief! "
19 " And I belive I am too, and if you think that is awful, then you dont understand a thing. "
20 " It's true that when anyone dies, the other dead rise up abd die all over again. "
