Merle Miller > Quotes

“I'll tell you this, though. It's not true, that saying about sticks and stones; it's words that break your bones.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“A young homosexual friend recently said, "It's no secret that you, that one, has such-and-such color hair, is yea high, weighs thus and so, and so on, but when you keep one part of yourself secret, that becomes the most important part of you."

And that is true, I think; it may be the most important truth of all.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“I have never infected anybody, and it's too late for the head people to do anything about me now. Gay is good. Gay is proud. Well, yes, I suppose. If I had been given a choice (but who is?), I would prefer to have been straight. But then, would I rather not have been me? Oh, I think not, not this morning anyway. It is a very clear day in late December, and the sun is shining on the pine trees outside my studio. The air is extraordinary clear, and the sky is the colour it gets only at this time of year, dark, almost navy-blue. On such a day I would not choose to be anyone else or any place else.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“That was the time for me to have said, "After all these years, is that what you think of me?" But I didn't. The moment passed. It passed as it had passed so many hundreds of times before, so many thousands of times before.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“Human beings need to give and receive love. Does it really matter whom we choose to love so long as we are loving?”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“No minority in this country or anywhere else has gained its rights by remaining silent, and no revolution has ever been made by the wary. Or the self-pitying.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“There it was, out at last, and if it seems like nothing very much, I can only say that it took a long time to say it, to be able to say it, and none of the journey was easy.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“I couldn't help thinking, with the required pinch of rue and regret, how different my life would have been if I had been born homosexual in 1950 instead of...But that's a tiresome game, and I'm too old to play it.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“but then we all know that actors shouldn’t be allowed out when they’re not on stage. The”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“I was, as you may have guessed, born tired and filled with bile. I”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“Never pretend to understand what you don’t understand,” Orion used to say, “and never let anybody tell you you should like something. You can educate your taste, but you can’t change it. So trust it.”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“. . . a thousand county seats of 7,000 each are a thousand times more important to this Republic than one city of 7,000,000. Our unemployment and our unrest are the result of the concentration of wealth, the concentration of population in industrial centers, mass production, and a lot of other so-called modern improvements. "We are building a tower of Babel.”
― Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman

“If you've done the best you can-if you have done what you had to do -there is no use worrying about it because nothing can change it .........and you have to be fresh for the next day. What you're going to do is more important than what you have done.”
― Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: an Oral Biography of Harry S Truman

“Orion loved argument just as much as I did, and we would shout at each other; quarrel violently, and continue to like each other. During”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“and I do not like french poodle people because a french poodle people is a bastard everywhere”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“I have yet to meet a Southern woman with two first names that wasn’t a man-eater.”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“Each homosexual must, of course, come out at his own time and in his own way, but homosexuals, the older as well as the younger, the ones in Brooks Brothers suits as well as those in black turtleneck sweaters have, I think, an obligation to declare themselves whenever they decently can.”
― Merle Miller, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual

“I’ve done one and a half of almost everything. But never two of anything. When you do two of something, you are no longer that bright, promising amateur. When you do two of anything, you must be judged, and I could never stand that.” He”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“He accepted neither the easy slogans of the left nor the easier shibboleths of the right. He was a man who accepted nobody’s answer for any problem—“…we”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“She said that if I ever did produce an autobiography I should call it, Exit, Talking.   This”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound

“the closest I can come to describing what the theater is like. A barbaric free-for-all in which should you ever win, you are for sure going to fall flat on your face or your ass.9”
― Merle Miller, A Gay and Melancholy Sound