Sue Miller Quotations

This will not only replace what you have now, it will drastically improve what you have now.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

I was struck after 9/11 by what seemed the assumption that everyone bereaved by that event was suffering the same thing. I wanted to explore how individual grief is, how complicated, how colored by the complexity of the mourner's relationship with the person who's died.

Basically we had outgrown our facility. And we were landlocked and didn't have room to grow.

I don't think it will ever be back like it was before.

I write all over the house. Because I write in longhand, I can go anywhere I want... I have some notebooks here and there, and then I type it in and pull it out, and I do the revisions all over the place.

I think the plasticity of the novel is its greatest challenge. There are no rules; there is no necessary form. You can know what you want it to be, or do, and still not know how to write it. There are endless possibilities, infinite choices. What voice should it be in? What events to start with? What characters will be part of it?

'Jane Eyre' must have been something I read six or seven times as an early adolescent. And 'Kristin Lavransdatter,' and 'Lorna Doone' when I was younger. My parents had a pretty rich library, no jackets on any of the books, so no descriptions. You just pulled something off the shelf and started to read it.

I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.

People are always thinking that I'm the main character in my books, but each one has been different, and sometimes they've been men.

Our whole home, our lives, got turned inside out. We just felt fortunate ours was still here, fortunate there were no deaths or anything like that.

My mother was a dramatic and egocentric person, and she died before my father, who died of Alzheimer's disease. But I'd often thought, God, we were so lucky that was the order in which they died because she would have felt put upon.

My writing life is always a bit disorganized. It's hard for me to get going, but sometimes, once I begin, I go like the wind.

I think I'm less disciplined than a lot of other people, I'm afraid, but on the other hand, I've written a lot of books.

We've had many people come in and say they had no idea.

We had one man out there trying to snag the flag with a fishing pole, since we couldn't use the rope to bring down the Mexican flag. I think all of our residents were upset about this, and we have a very diversified population here.

We worked hard to find the right site for the skate park.

Two of these trucks will travel nationwide, two of these trucks will travel along the I-5 corridor. I know we'll get tips on these cases.

Everything I've written I see in a very precise way and I hear in my inner ear.

It was too treacherous. It was unsafe. All the coaches, except one, were in agreement (to stop the meet).

Right now, we're stretched payday to payday, but we'll get it done.

This is not a plan that is motivated by what the citizens need or want. This plan is not driven by need.... but by greed.

I try to work in the mornings. Usually, I write in my pajamas and slowly assemble myself. I don't get organized and sit down and get dressed. I do the laundry. I drift in and out of writing.

It is ridiculous that they have been allowing the import of birds as pets in recent weeks without even placing them in quarantine.

It's a panic time for parents.They're not thinking about this information, they're focused on getting their child back.

I wanted to write a beautiful book that was useful to other people who find themselves in the same position.

I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.

You can prepay at any time. If you're making much better money in two years you can begin making triple payments if you like.

among the most fascinating of human social or economic inventions.

Loss brings pain. Yes. But pain triggers memory. And memory is a kind of new birth, within each of us. And it is that new birth after long pain, that resurrection - in memory - that, to our surprise, perhaps, comforts us.

And I was remembering that time in our lives together, the time of those ritual walks. I was remembering the way it feels at just that moment when you begin to turn, when you’re poised exactly between the things in life you want to do and those you need to do, and it seems for a few blessed seconds that they are all going to be the same.

And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies.

But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that’s dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be—even about yourself—may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven.

I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.

I suppose in our contemporary lives, our cumulative e-mails might constitute a kind of diary: that informal, moment-by-moment description of life as it goes by. . As I think of those notes now - what I wrote, what I said - it seems to me they danced across the surface just as my grandmother's diaries did - Anais Nin she wasn't, and I wasn't, either. Who is? Not even Anais Nin.

There is something truly restorative, finally comforting, in coming to the end of an illusion - a false hope.

It seems we need someone to know us as we are - with all we have done - and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please.

But pain may be a gift to us. Remember, after all, that pain is one of the ways we register in memory the things that vanish, that are taken away. We fix them in our minds forever by yearning, by pain, by crying out. Pain, the pain that seems unbearable at the time, is memory's first imprinting step, the cornerstone of the temple we erect inside us in memory of the dead. Pain is part of memory, and memory is a God-given gift.

Kids need to see that Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to us. And they need to know it can happen to them.