...the words make our silences easier--they're the current that runs under them.

~ Sue Miller

Sue Miller Silences Sue Miller While I Was Gone Words

It seems we need someone to know us as we are--with all we have done--and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please. ...for...others it seems there must be a person to redeem us to ourselves. It isn't enough, apparently, to know oneself. To forgive oneself in secret.

~ Sue Miller

Sue Miller Forgiveness Love Secrets Sue Miller While I Was Gone

But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.

~ Sue Miller

Sue Miller Anger Relationships Silence Sue Miller While I Was Gone

For it wasn't the secret--the secret that wasn't a secret anyway--that led to austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies.

~ Sue Miller

Sue Miller Austerity Lies Secrets Silences Sue Miller While I Was Gone

The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice this, to be grateful for it.

~ Sue Miller

Sue Miller Gratitude Ordinary Things Sue Miller While I Was Gone

A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.

~ Sue Miller

Sue Miller Secrets Sue Miller While I Was Gone