Heather Miller > Quotes

“With words spent, sensing Lizzie trailing behind my horse, I heeled for speed, passing beyond the mules and my brothers, hoping they wouldn’t see my unmanly tears. I flew past them before the drops hit the ground, hoping, for a moment longer, to delay wet wings, grounding us, drowning us in swaths of inevitable rain.”
― Heather Miller, Yellow Bird's Song

“The constant clack of train wheels over the steel track was enough to lull anyone to sleep. When I looked up from rereading Papa’s journal, passengers slept with their heads bent back against neighboring bench seats. In such momentary quiet, looking out train windows, I unwound the landscape. Along the plains, taupe fields planted deep with wheat seamed the green forest beyond. Across Kentucky, acres of bluegrass and waxy leaves of green corn touched an azure horizon. In Virginia, the Appalachian valleys blurred gray, as if they still hid widows and orphans wearing mourning cloaks after enduring five years of civil war.”
― Heather Miller, Yellow Bird's Song

“Four-eyed Beatty was one of my typesetters, still a juniper in the news, not yet knee-high to a lamb, skinny as a barber’s cat, with his clergyman’s collar buttoned to the top and his suspenders pulling his pants too short. The young man was plum stuck between hay and grass. He’d never jump the broom and find a piece of calico shorter than him. But I didn’t hire him for his stature. The young man wrote better than a hickory above a persimmon, but talked as though he were translating Latin.”
― Heather Miller, Yellow Bird's Song

“It was a wrathful God who constructed man’s body with strength and hate enough to kill, but his conscience, his memory, to preserve such a sin. Such contradiction explained why man rose and fell in God’s once wild Eden. If man confessed, sought baptism among Earth’s winged and gilled creatures, God’s forgiveness was as assured as the hum of summer bees. But the wind rose and trapped unearthed anger beneath my skin, muting any such confession.”
― Heather Miller, Yellow Bird's Song