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… — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
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… — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
It seems we need someone to know us as we are - with all we have done - and forgive us. We need to… — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
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… — Sue Miller Copy Share
Kids need to see that Jesus is the best thing that ever happened to us. And they need to know it can happen to… — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
“I tried to talk about it to Lily, to make her see that for once, I'd earned a feeling. [p. 174]” — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
“I was recalling that other world in which it had thrilled me, in a way, the surprise of thinking that I could be a person who would betray Daniel. Now I wondered if Daniel could surprise himself, could surprise me, by being such a person too. Would he let himself do such a thing? I didn’t think so. And then… — Sue Miller Copy Share
“Now he turned the radio on to the news. As we did our separate chores, we listened and commented idly to each other on… — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind. — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
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… — Sue Miller Copy Share
“And then heard Detective Ryan’s pleased voice talking about Eli, about killers who’ve gone free: “They have to tell,” he’d said Well, apparently so. But why? What is it that comes from the telling? Some of it must be relief, of course. A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight. It seems as we need… — Sue Miller Copy Share
“But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded… — Sue Miller Copy Share Image
“Doggone, I never thought I’d lose my mind.” I was startled at the time to realize this – that he had thought about it. But now that he is dead…it’s my turn to think of it – of death – and I do. I wonder how it will come to me. And when I do, I remember this moment; when… — Sue Miller Copy Share
“The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice… — Sue Miller Copy Share Image