Life & Wisdom Quote by Jane Smiley

Smiley’s line is a quiet arson attack on the stories we tell about ourselves. “In my experience” sounds modest, even provisional, but it’s a novelist’s trapdoor: she invites you into the supposedly messy realm of lived reality, then delivers a clean, ruthless claim. Desire isn’t one motive among many; it’s the motive. Everything else - reasons, principles, ethics, ideology - gets demoted to set dressing.

The sentence works because of its blunt sequencing. “Only one motivation” has the satisfying brutality of a verdict. Then she denies the two alibis people reach for when desire looks ugly: rationalization (“reasons”) and moral self-image (“principle”). The phrasing “contain it or stand against it” is especially telling. It imagines desire as a force that can be fenced in or confronted, then insists neither strategy holds. Desire leaks. Desire wins. If you’ve read Smiley, you can feel the novelistic worldview behind it: humans aren’t arguments; they’re weather systems.

The subtext isn’t that principles are fake, but that they’re often retrofitted. We don’t choose what we want, and once we want it, we recruit language to make it sound inevitable, deserved, even virtuous. That’s not cynicism for its own sake; it’s a diagnostic tool. Smiley is interested in how families fracture, how communities perform decency, how people betray themselves while insisting they’re being “reasonable.” The context is literary realism at its sharpest: an insistence that appetite, longing, envy, lust, ambition - the unglamorous engine room of character - explains behavior more reliably than any speech we give about ideals.