Laura Miller Quotes & Sayings

I loved you too much to lose you twice. — Laura Miller

Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose. — Laura Miller

Of all the butterflies that chose to stay,
I'm in love with the one that got away. — Laura Miller

See, I'm in love with the person you can never outrun. I'm in love with you. — Laura Miller

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [ ... ] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever. — Laura Miller

Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold! — Laura Miller

We're all livin' in the past ... we're really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin' ... that's how long it takes our brains to comprehend what's already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I'm not alone. Everyone's livin' in the past, to some extent. I've just become a prisoner of mine ... I've become a prisoner - willingly. But then I guess you really can't be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains. — Laura Miller

Girls are treasures, son." He points the key at me while eyeing me from over the top of his glasses. "And when one gives you somethin', it's like she's givin' you a piece of her treasure. — Laura Miller

Nonfiction brought me back to earth and sobered me up whenever it seemed like I'd become too drunk on the lives and loves of imaginary people, but that doesn't mean it was any less thrilling or transporting, although it was often more illuminating. — Laura Miller

Perfect love was that kind of love that made no sense but made everything else make sense somehow. It was raw and unscripted, turbulent and slightly unpredictable. — Laura Miller

Maybe the story of our life is what we make of it. I mean, we're dealt the rain and the sun, but maybe it's up to us to push away the clouds in order to see the rainbow. — Laura Miller

We get used to pretty ... eventually, we get used to sunsets and falling stars and things that sparkle. — Laura Miller

I have to know if you believe in second chances - because I do, even if they do come with good-byes. — Laura Miller

There's still is a status-quo group at City Hall who likes things done the old way, behind closed doors. — Laura Miller

What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: it admits us to experiences other than our own. — Laura Miller

When you really love someone, you don't let them go - mostly, because you can't. Nature won't allow it. But also, because you just don't. — Laura Miller

I gave him a piece of my heart a long time ago, and once you give that away, I've learned you don't so easily get it back. — Laura Miller

Deep down, we're all some kind of crazy, Ada. — Laura Miller

Say: If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders. — Laura Miller

And I didn't even try to fight the smile returning to my face, as I realized in that moment that I would eat a million pepperoni pizzas for that girl. And she knew. Damn it. — Laura Miller

A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there. — Laura Miller

Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for. — Laura Miller

If you've ever read one of those articles that asks notable people to list their favorite books, you may have been impressed or daunted to see them pick Proust or Thomas Mann or James Joyce. You might even feel sheepish about the fact that you reread Pride and Prejudice or The Lord of the Rings, or The Catcher in the Rye or Gone With the Wind every couple of years with some much pleasure. Perhaps, like me, you're even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones we'd most like other people to think we read over and over again. — Laura Miller

Just remember, the single most important thing in this world is love. You find it, you fight for it. — Laura Miller

I believe that there is a perfect someone for everyone, and I know that you still believe that too. There is a perfect someone, even if the road to that someone isn't all that perfect, he added. — Laura Miller

When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.
Laura Miller - Butterfly Weeds — Laura Miller

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall. — Laura Miller

Don't count him out, Julia. He hasn't given up on you. — Laura Miller

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city. — Laura Miller

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money ... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams. — Laura Miller

I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults - librarians, friends' parents - suggest to me that I liked books "with magic" because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face. — Laura Miller

The past isn't always as beautiful as we paint it in our minds. — Laura Miller

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods ... and real ethics reform at City Hall. — Laura Miller

But kind of like when you move something on a wall after it's been there for a long time, and its place is bright but everything around it is faded - that's how I feel about her. She wasn't there very long, but when she left, everything around her memory sort of dimmed. — Laura Miller

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly. — Laura Miller

Desperation will drive you to do things you know will never make you whole again and even to lose the very thing you're desperate for. — Laura Miller

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems. — Laura Miller

We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it - passion - is one of those things that you have an endless amount of - like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again. — Laura Miller

You could spend hours following the trail of a single dispute, through smoking battlefields of interlinked comments threads and screen shots and blogs where the message "this post has been deleted by its author" stands like a tombstone over the grave of the one witness who can tell you what really happened. I know, because I've wandered extensively over this blasted heath in the past couple of weeks. — Laura Miller

Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn't ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it's going to be tempting, and from there it's only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked. — Laura Miller

It's wasteful spending like this that not only forces tax increases and cuts in vital services ... but also really make you wonder: who is City Hall looking out for? — Laura Miller

Hope is a funny thing when you think about it. It's something you always have. You just have to believe you do. — Laura Miller

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely. — Laura Miller

We have but one dance to a lifetime of songs. — Laura Miller

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days. — Laura Miller

Given the way some fought for the status quo when I authored the new Ethics Code and created the city's first Ethics Commission, we are going to need your strong support to get an even tougher Ethics Code passed this year. — Laura Miller

At times, the road will be hard, the days will be long, and the journey you've traveled won't feel like a song. But know that I'll always love you, and with love, all is certain. — Laura Miller

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books. — Laura Miller

Brooke was always my summer. She'll always be my summer. And I had already made my choice a long time ago. Loving Brooke was what I was made to do. — Laura Miller

These days, though, he was as unpredictable as an alley cat. One minute, he's purring on
your lap. The next, he's scowling at you from the window sill, and you're left wondering if he's plotting your demise over there, just waiting for you to fall asleep. That's Will. — Laura Miller

Because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly — Laura Miller

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac. — Laura Miller

Remember when life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile. — Laura Miller

I'll save a spot for you on the hood of my truck. — Laura Miller

But there is so much more to do for the city we love ... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination. — Laura Miller

If there's one thing I hope people are certain of it's this: I'm looking out for YOU - the taxpayer. — Laura Miller

How does the story really go?
Does she ever cross your mind?
Does she ever steal your nights?
Is she still a part of you?
Do you ever wish she were still by your side?
And what would you do?
If she walked up here tomorrow
And told you that she loved you?
Would you drop it all and run to her?
Would you tell her you love her too?
Or would you simply send her home?
And tell her you've moved on?
Tell me, Buddy, what would you do? — Laura Miller

Together, often by unanimous vote, the council has worked quickly to get positive results. — Laura Miller

But despite the challenges, I love being your Mayor. — Laura Miller

I just want you to know that I love you with everything I am - a million times a million and to the moon and back. — Laura Miller

From my very first day in the Mayor's office, I have worked closely with the Council members who share our vision of a city hall that really protects taxpayers and cares ... yes ... about the little things that make a big difference in people's lives. — Laura Miller

I'll find my way back to you, Brooke Sommerfield. As sure as the sun is gonna rise in the mornin', I'll find you, I whisper into the wind. - River — Laura Miller

Real love bleeds, — Laura Miller

Litchat, however, is singleminded. Seemingly, it can only conceive of a writer's persona as one thing at a time: a prick, a detached brainiac, a suffering saint. Litchat is adamant, yes, and impervious to factual challenges, but that tends to be true of all strong opinions formed on a basis of incomplete and selective evidence. The weaker our footing, the more fiercely we defend it. We believe it not because it fits what we know - we know next to nothing, after all - but because we need to believe this particular thing at this particular time, regardless of what the truth may be. It suits our purposes to do so, and one of those purposes may be as flimsy as the desire to be excused from reading the books in question before telling the world what we think of them. — Laura Miller

Others like City Hall the old way, when they could make deals behind closed doors with your tax money. — Laura Miller

She tries to wear her pain on the inside. She always has. It's the trademark of the oldest sibling, I think. — Laura Miller

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list. — Laura Miller

I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for. — Laura Miller

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date - one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone. — Laura Miller

Words are great, but even I can admit they have certain short-comings. No word can ever give justice to a smile from a man who never smiled or to an old woman who gives up her seat on the bus to a soldier who lost his leg. And I'm still convinced there's no word out there for the feeling you get the first time you ever hit home plate or bury your first dog or muster up enough courage to tell a girl you love her. — Laura Miller

There is so much chaos and dysfunction going on with the federal government that Dallas can't wait any longer for federal help. — Laura Miller

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing. — Laura Miller

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives ... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs. — Laura Miller

And you wanna know how i know i love you? He asks. I know because when I see you, I smile. I know because when I'm not with you, you're all I can think about. I know because when I hear good news, you're the first person I want to tell. And I know because when I hear bad news, you're the first person I want to talk to. — Laura Miller

I'll love you until the last petal falls, Jules. — Laura Miller

There is a perfect someone, even if the road to that someone isn't all that perfect. — Laura Miller

Maybe we knew each other in another life. Or maybe we were just meant to find each other in this one. — Laura Miller

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects. — Laura Miller

More than every once in awhile,
More than most dreams,
More than just my heart,
More than anything,
More than you know,
And more than I can say,
I've loved you more
Every passing day — Laura Miller

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published. — Laura Miller

I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life - the one I feel as though I've abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn't perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch - it's all perfect. Time won't let me see it otherwise. They're all just perfect memories - perfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream. — Laura Miller

Because I see
A rainstorm in June
Just before the sun
The black of night
Just before the stars
And, girl, I see your ghost
Just before our dawn — Laura Miller

Adventure ... is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. — Laura Miller

She was also a memory, the worst kind of memory
the kind that pulled you to your knees at just the sound of her name. — Laura Miller

The levee had always been my beach, the world beyond it, my ocean. That's as close as it got here, anyway. No waves, no dolphins, no white sand, no sea gulls. If you were lucky enough, though, every once in a while you did get to see a crane, or a beaver. — Laura Miller

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime. — Laura Miller

You're much too beautiful for tears. — Laura Miller

This is one of the chief differences between a child's experience of a favorite book and an educated adult's. For the adult, a book may be a work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story. — Laura Miller

Make no mistake, the organizations website counsels. You will be writing a lot of crap. And thats a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. I am not the first person to point out that writing a lot of crap doesnt sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November. — Laura Miller

But no, Sir, to answer your question. I'm taken, and I have been since I was sixteen, Will confessed — Laura Miller

There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis's further suggestion that if we can find even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale. — Laura Miller

I've come to learn two truths about love. One: The fall is the easy part. Two: It's best not to fall. — Laura Miller

Her smile is like a summer storm - something in between calm and dangerous. — Laura Miller

A part of me will probably always be waitin' for her. And even when I get to the end of this life and she's not there, I think I'll still just wait. It's the cruel reality of love, I think - that once you find it, it's yours to carry. And even if you lose it and never find it back again, I think you still just keep on carrying it ... and waitin' - long after the curtain closes. — Laura Miller

The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets. — Laura Miller

Sometimes the hearts we steal are not the hearts we were ever meant to keep. — Laura Miller

He was always my moon, my stars, my world. — Laura Miller

Little girl, little boy
If love has a way
Fill their fields with laughter
And scatter the sun on their day
And if it should happen to rain
Make their raindrops kisses
Straight from heaven above
That touch their hands and faces
And that fill them with love
And make the moon reflect their smiles
And their stars plenty
And, above all, keep them together
And hold them as you may
Forever and ever
Until their last day. — Laura Miller

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal. — Laura Miller

I just want her to know that she's still beautiful, after all these years, and that I'm here - always, — Laura Miller