Top 31 Sue Miller Quotes
#1. I tried to talk about it to Lily, to make her see that for once, I'd earned a feeling. [p. 174]
Sue Miller
#2. There is something truly restorative, finally comforting, in coming to the end of an illusion - a false hope.
Sue Miller
#3. If you just stick your big toe in the water when it comes to helping someone else, you'll get one big toe's worth of life change.
Sue Miller
#4. But then he returned and our life went on. Three days gone. A week. I measured the time in the faint waning of my consciousness of my misery, and wondered if this would one day be enough: simply not to be consciously miserable anymore.
Sue Miller
#5. Everything I've written I see in a very precise way and I hear in my inner ear.
Sue Miller
#6. 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.
Sue Miller
#7. 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.
Sue Miller
#8. 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.
Sue Miller
#9. That she is beautiful, an impossible kind of beauty, composed of all the wrong elements: white hair, the flawless but deeply lined skin, the freckles of age dotting the hands and face.
Sue Miller
#10. 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.
Sue Miller
#11. This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version's vanishing.
Sue Miller
#12. People think they know what you're feeling. What you must be feeling. And because it's easier not to expose yourself, what you're truly feeling, you don't disabuse them. You go through the motions for them.
Sue Miller
#13. 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.
Sue Miller
#14. I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy ... that makes you unkind.
Sue Miller
#15. A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.
Sue Miller
#16. But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.
Sue Miller
#17. 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.
Sue Miller
#18. There were disappointments. Things you couldn't know you had wanted, or even things you were quite certain you hadn't wanted, but still, as you discovered, missed some aspect of.
Sue Miller
#19. 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.
Sue Miller
#20. We want. When we stop wanting, we feel dead and want to want more. (p.232)
Sue Miller
#21. 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.
Sue Miller
#22. 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.
Sue Miller
#23. 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.
Sue Miller
#24. Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on what we heard - the politics, the plane crashes and crimes, the large disasters of the day, which we all use to keep the smaller, more long-term sorrows at bay.
Sue Miller
#25. The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice this, to be grateful for it.
Sue Miller
#26. I sometimes worried that the more instinctive forms of love were not so available to you. That easy maternal devotion, for instance, that seemed so natural in some women, and which, as we spoke of from time to time, was something you had to struggle to feel. [p. 189]
Sue Miller
#27. She guarded herself against it, she supposed, the way she guarded herself against everything difficult or painful - by being loving, by being solicitous.
Sue Miller
#28. her. "How do you always know that stuff?" she asked. "Are you kidding? Everyone knows that stuff." He went back to the kitchen to start cleaning up. Meri crossed to the lilies. Bending over them,
Sue Miller
#29. 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.
Sue Miller
#30. 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.
Sue Miller
#31. The words make our silences easier
they're the current that runs under them.
Sue Miller
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top