Life & Wisdom Quote by Jane Smiley

Desire sits at the root of action, the engine that starts before thought and keeps running long after reasons have been marshaled. Jane Smiley distills a novelist’s hard-won observation: people do what they want, then furnish explanations to make sense of it. Reasons and principles rarely originate the motion; they arrive after, to justify or to beautify it. Even when we claim duty or morality, what often moves us is the desire to see ourselves as dutiful or moral. Principle looks like a stop sign, but desire drives through, or reroutes around it, or changes what the sign seems to say.

Smiley’s fiction is thick with ordinary people pushed by longings for love, security, status, land, and recognition. In A Thousand Acres, the wish for control and the hunger for acknowledgment unravel a family; the stated principles of stewardship or filial piety cannot withstand what the characters want. The pattern is familiar beyond literature. Political ideals falter when they obstruct the craving for power. Rational plans fail because they underestimate the stubbornness of appetite. Even altruism depends on desire, whether it is the ache to relieve suffering, the joy of usefulness, or the longing to belong to a just cause. Strip away the story, and there is a wanting.

The claim is not cynical so much as clarifying. It insists on honesty about what actually moves us. If reasons and principles cannot contain desire, then prudence and ethics must start by recognizing and shaping it rather than pretending to replace it. Rules that ignore appetite breed hypocrisy; institutions that channel desire toward constructive ends can transform it. Self-mastery, on this view, is not the eradication of wanting but the cultivation of better wants. Smiley points us toward a moral psychology grounded in motives as they are, not as we wish them to be, and toward responsibility that begins with acknowledging our true aims.