“She 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
“Words 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
“Litchat, 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
“The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.”
— Laura Miller
“Desire 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
“Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.”
— Laura Miller
“If 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
“Adventure,’ 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
“Do 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
“A 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
“If 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
“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.”
— Laura Miller
“Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.”
– Laura Miller
“Together, often by unanimous vote, the council has worked quickly to get positive results.”
– Laura Miller
“But there is so much more to do for the city we love… a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.”
– Laura Miller
“In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money… and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.”
– Laura Miller