Quotes from 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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

She guarded herself against it, she supposed, the way she guarded herself against everything difficult or painful—by being loving, by being solicitous.

the way she felt about her past was that she had somehow come into being who she was without any connection to it. As if floating in naked and unencumbered on some shell

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

She'd thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn't a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with.

Abruptly, they seemed alike to me and equally dear: my father, my son. I felt as though my father had been waiting for this moment to be born to me as the young man he'd been, so touchingly willing to bear witness to his conscience; and the surprise of this new sense of him, this birth, was a gift to me, a sudden balm in those days of my most intense grief.

We didn't know what would happen next: that was our great gift. The gift of youth. The thing we miss, it seems to me, no matter what we've made of our lives, as we get older. When we do know what will happen next. And next and next, and then last.

She's thinking, it seems, of the course of her life; she's wondering, perhaps, if her story makes sense, if it means anything, or amounts to anything.

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.

I dreamed of my grandparents living there as though they always had with their habits, their rituals, their ways of speaking. With the illusory sense I had as a girl, when my own world was so fragile, that they always would be there. That they would always welcome me and care for me. That they were a place I could always go. A homeland

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

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.

Sam felt more and more that there was no room for him to be who he really was with Claire.

He'd taught her something tonight. Taught her almost painlessly. Almost. She'd thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn't a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with. She felt small, and foolish, exposed.

Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn't just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence." She smiled at Edith. "I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the