Quotes from Sue Miller

It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.

course, it's never the same.")

think that for others in my family, who didn't see him at the end, who didn't witness his slow decline, he may live intact in memory, much as he was before his illness. I hope so. But that isn't true for me. It was in part to exorcise my final haunting images of my father that I wanted to look at, to explain, the way he fragmented and lost himself in his illness; and who he was before

Dylan Thomas, 'Fern Hill

Love isn't just what two people have together, it's what two people make together, so of course, it's never the same.")

More important to what happened in our family, though, was the way my father felt about his work. He loved it. He believed in it with a pure fervor bordering on the religious.

Now that psychiatrists are defrocked weekly in New Yorker cartoons, it's difficult to recall what this once meant, how seriously men like him were taken.

Later I used to wonder why it was so difficult for him to bear the pain of his family when he was so forgiving of the pain of his patients.

announcement

She shrugs finally. At any rate, no, I have no wish to change my life. And he realizes, suddenly, what he has been asking her. Realizes that the version of life he has offered Gaby - their life together - is a gift he has given her and has no right to take away. He reaches over and touches her hand. Of course you don't.

She had read the same sentence over and over, and each time she lifted her eyes to look at Graham, he was always there, looking back at her. The wait had seemed endless to her, but finally the lights blinked off and on several times, and the store began to empty out.

I'd be a bad bet even if there there no Annie, Rosemary. I would have been. I'm just not good at saying no. I want–I always want to say yes. And I want to want to say yes. To everything. I'm a greedy person. More or less bottomlessly hungry.' He thinks of babies again.

Maybe the passing of time had made a monogamous man of Graham.

too, though she felt less sure

to the present, that this was

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.