Sue Miller Quotes

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

— Sue Miller

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.

— Sue Miller

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

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

“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

“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.”

— 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.”

— Sue Miller

“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

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

The words make our silences easier
they're the current that runs under them.

— Sue Miller

“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 desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy. That makes you unkind. When I described myself as I was at that time to Daniel, I often said to him, You wouldn't have liked me then.”

— Sue Miller

“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 I wondered: Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life?
I tried to call up the moment when I had decided I could be such a person. It seemed to me I hadn't quite got there, not really. That I was still just playing with the idea of it when the ground shifted under me. But perhaps to play with such an idea was already to be a certain kind of person.
”

— Sue Miller

“We want. When we stop wanting, we feel dead and want to want more. (p.232)”

— Sue Miller

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

A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.

— Sue Miller

“My sister and I were the ones in the family who had seen this as necessary; neither of my brothers felt there was a problem with Dad. And in general when I'd expressed my concern for him, she was the one of my siblings who responded. She and I had also been the ones who sorted through and distributed mother's possessions after she had died.”

— Sue Miller

“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

“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

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

“Do you remember when everyone thought Bush (sr) had a mistress too"" he asks in the course of a Clinton era conversation. "But she was rumored to be someone wealthy and Waspy, of course ... The problem here is the goddamn Democrats, who sleep down, you see. They love that white trash ... And white trash loves publicity,so the Democrats are the ones who get into all the trouble. As opposed to the Republicans. They sleep up ... Up, where all is Episcopalian and quiet as death itself, and no one ever has to hear a thing about it”

— Sue Miller

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

— Sue Miller

“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

“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

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

— Sue Miller

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

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

“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

“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

“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?”

— Sue Miller

“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

“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

“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

“'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.”

— Sue Miller

“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

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.

— Sue Miller

“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

“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

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

— Sue Miller

“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