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Austerity Quote by Sue Miller

“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.”

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Austerity Different Firsts Jokes Kind Lying Made Marriage Secret Silence Wells What if Wife

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“I tried to talk about it to Lily, to make her see that for once, I'd earned a feeling. [p. 174]”

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“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…

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

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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…

“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…

“But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded…

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“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…

“The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice…

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“You might have thought I’d worry about him, about causing him pain or at least embarrassment. I simply didn’t. I felt the kind of…

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