68 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There were disappointments. Things you couldn’t know you had wanted, or even things you were quite certain you hadn’t wanted, but still, as you discovered, missed some aspect of.

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

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.