01UndatedBuying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.Laura Miller / quote ↗
02UndatedIf 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 / quote ↗
03UndatedA 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 / quote ↗
04UndatedDo the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?Laura Miller / quote ↗
05UndatedAdventure,' 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 / quote ↗
06UndatedIf 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 / quote ↗
07UndatedDreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.Laura Miller / quote ↗
08UndatedDesire 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 / quote ↗
09UndatedThe closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.Laura Miller / quote ↗
10UndatedLitchat, 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 / quote ↗
11UndatedWords 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 / quote ↗
12UndatedShe 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 / quote ↗
14UndatedMaybe 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 / quote ↗
15UndatedBut 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 / quote ↗
16UndatedA 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 / quote ↗
17UndatedWe’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 / quote ↗
18UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
20UndatedShe always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.Laura Miller / quote ↗
21UndatedBig events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.Laura Miller / quote ↗
22UndatedShe tries to wear her pain on the inside. She always has. It’s the trademark of the oldest sibling, I think.Laura Miller / quote ↗
23UndatedWhen life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.Laura Miller - Butterfly WeedsLaura Miller / quote ↗
24UndatedI 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 / quote ↗
