Andrew Miller > Quotes

“First ambitions are best. We are less brave later.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world's character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes?”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“Why are there no handsome priest in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘A pair of these lads can pump for me.’
‘Is this a time for playing?’ asks Jean Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“Could he not go to hospital?' asks Jean-Baptiste.
The doctor flares his nostrils. 'Hospitals are very dangerous places. Particularly to one already weakened by illness.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“Why did the reindeer fly over the mountain? Answer: Because he couldn't fly under it.”
― Andrew Miller, Kids Educational Books: Christmas Jokes For Kids - The Funniest, Cleverest, & Silliest Christmas Jokes You and Your Child Have Ever Heard!

“The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his ciggarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn't up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So, it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed at her through the smoke of his ciggarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying, sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conservatively, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, 'They used flame-throwers, you know'. And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.”
― Andrew Miller

“Everywhere women were insulted with impunity, insulted by men. If a few of them suffered for their insolence as the overseer had, it might be no more than they deserved.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“what extent was mind just circumstance? Would he begin to think like Mr. Earle, to become like him? But mind must also be the history of circumstance, and his history and Mr. Earle’s could have very few touching points.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Her anger, at that precise moment, was absent. The anger, the fear, the shame, the wound that had to be tended like a wayside shrine. And what had replaced them? Only this: the rattling of the little car, the whirr of the heater, the shards of light beyond the edges of the road. A sadness she could live with. Some new interest in herself.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Home, it turned out, had been the perfect preparation for not being at home.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“There were side-effects, of course, risks (respiratory arrest), but if his patients died as addicts, they were not first driven mad by pain.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“He had expected to feel restless in the house, trapped. Instead he felt a certain pleasure in surrendering to what he could not change.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Time would level it out, for that, he had learned (quite recently), was what time did.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“He was, thought Eric, a man with as close to nothing as made no difference. The inmate of an asylum; someone who could not possibly look back at his life with any kind of pleasure. Yet there was, in the thin light of his winter eyes, a certain slaty grandeur, as if failure had raised him up, had scoured him in a way one might almost envy.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“She was going back to a type of failure and to whatever dull explanations it occasioned. She saw them, she and Eric, either side of the kitchen table, each staring into the dark of themselves to say what no longer really mattered. It was, she supposed, unavoidable. It was what people did, people in their situation. And there was something shaming in that too, their being caught up in what they would once have thought of with contempt, or a shudder, as if considering an illness (the sort one didn’t discuss at table) others might suffer from, but you knew you never would . . .”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Now he learns that time trails men like a killer,thorough, even-handed, collecting the evidence of the years. Nothing is lost.”
― Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain

“outfits. Her head is bare. She has”
― Andrew Miller, The Crossing

“В доме напротив жили наркоманы, оттуда постоянно доносился металлический скрежет радио. По ночам от этой музыки казалось - черти волокут грешников в ад.”
― Andrew Miller, The Optimists: A Haunting Literary Novel of Trauma and a Photojournalist's Shattered Faith After Genocide

“Nothing worse than a woman who was trying.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“I’m going to be someone who thinks.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“polyglot, attempts to draw them into conversation.”
― Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain

“The fire burned the camp down but it could not take away what had happened there. The guards, women among them, were brutal idiots, but she knew, even at fourteen, that they would be replaced, that it wasn’t an end to murder at all, that it would go on somewhere else, always keeping a little ahead of the cleansing fire.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“He is wearing a suit of pistachio silk, a silk lining of green and saffron stripes. The waistcoat, cut at the top of the thigh, is also pistachio, with modest gold-thread embroidery. The cuffs of the coat are small, the collar high. The cravat–saffron again–is almost as large as Armand’s.”
― Andrew Miller, Pure

“the wit.’ The Reverend”
― Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain: Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize

“Instead, he dreamed, briefly and powerfully, of Ernesto Medina stretched out on the grass and through his white shirt, the skin of his face, two dozen crimson flowers coming into bloom.”
― Andrew Miller, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

“He left the churns on the wooden loading platform (it was built from old sleepers that wept their tar in summer).”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter