Sue Miller famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Jesus #Kids #Needs
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.
-- Sue Miller

#Grandmother #Thinking #Might
There is something truly restorative, finally comforting, in coming to the end of an illusion - a false hope.
-- Sue Miller

#Comforting #Serious #Illusion
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

#Sight #Forgiving #Done
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

#Pain #Memories #Loss
I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.
-- Sue Miller

#Thinking #Empathy #Kind
But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps itâ€™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 thatâ€™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 beâ€”even about yourselfâ€”may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven.
-- Sue Miller

#Distance #Bridges #Risk
And what if weâ€™d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if weâ€™d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasnâ€™t the secretâ€”the secret that wasnâ€™t a secret anywayâ€”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.
-- Sue Miller

#Lying #Wife #Silence
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 youâ€™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.
-- Sue Miller

#Blessed #Together #Want
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.
-- Sue Miller

#Pain #Memories #Taken

You may also like:

Alice Hoffman
Novelist
Anita Shreve
Writer
Anjelica Huston
Actress
Anna Quindlen
Author
Anne Tyler
Novelist
Chris Bohjalian
Novelist
Elizabeth Berg
Writer
Eric Van Lustbader
Writer
Gail Godwin
Novelist
Heidi W. Durrow
Writer
Jacquelyn Mitchard
Journalist
Jane Hamilton
Novelist
John Hart
Author
Kathleen Grissom
Historian
Leonard Nimoy
Actor
Meg Waite Clayton
Novelist
Mel Gibson
Actor
Tatiana de Rosnay
Journalist
William Landay
Novelist
Joel Dicker
Novelist