Laura Miller Quotes

I'll love you until the last petal falls, Jules.

I have to know if you believe in second chances - because I do, even if they do come with good-byes.

Don't count him out, Julia. He hasn't given up on you.

She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.

I had found him again, and with him, my world had become completely unwound. It was messy and impulsive, naïve and irrational, and somehow, right again.

Desperation will drive you to do things you know will never make you whole again and even to lose the very thing you're desperate for.

Because we all know that the books we've loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly

Sometimes the hearts we steal are not the hearts we were ever meant to keep.

I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life - the one I feel as though I've abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn't perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch - it's all perfect. Time won't let me see it otherwise. They're all just perfect memories - perfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream.

I'll save a spot for you on the hood of my truck.

From my very first day in the Mayor's office, I have worked closely with the Council members who share our vision of a city hall that really protects taxpayers and cares ... yes ... about the little things that make a big difference in people's lives.

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing.

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [ ... ] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

I'll find my way back to you, Brooke Sommerfield. As sure as the sun is gonna rise in the mornin', I'll find you, I whisper into the wind. - River

Hope is a funny thing when you think about it. It's something you always have. You just have to believe you do.

How does the story really go?
Does she ever cross your mind?
Does she ever steal your nights?
Is she still a part of you?
Do you ever wish she were still by your side?
And what would you do?
If she walked up here tomorrow
And told you that she loved you?
Would you drop it all and run to her?
Would you tell her you love her too?
Or would you simply send her home?
And tell her you've moved on?
Tell me, Buddy, what would you do?

You're much too beautiful for tears.

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.

I gave him a piece of my heart a long time ago, and once you give that away, I've learned you don't so easily get it back.

Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for.

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.

But despite the challenges, I love being your Mayor.

We get used to pretty ... eventually, we get used to sunsets and falling stars and things that sparkle.

Remember when life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.

These days, though, he was as unpredictable as an alley cat. One minute, he's purring on
your lap. The next, he's scowling at you from the window sill, and you're left wondering if he's plotting your demise over there, just waiting for you to fall asleep. That's Will.

I believe that there is a perfect someone for everyone, and I know that you still believe that too. There is a perfect someone, even if the road to that someone isn't all that perfect, he added.

Her smile is like a summer storm - something in between calm and dangerous.

We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it - passion - is one of those things that you have an endless amount of - like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.

I just want her to know that she's still beautiful, after all these years, and that I'm here - always,

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.

Maybe the story of our life is what we make of it. I mean, we're dealt the rain and the sun, but maybe it's up to us to push away the clouds in order to see the rainbow.

Because I see
A rainstorm in June
Just before the sun
The black of night
Just before the stars
And, girl, I see your ghost
Just before our dawn

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with ...

Now, you and I both know that I'll wait a lifetime for you – remember, Butterfly Weeds never give up – so take your time down there. And tonight, as you watch that big, orange sun disappear into the earth and your world gradually grow dark, I'll help God turn on the stars, and I'll wait for my dawn – when you return to me, Julia Stephens.

I love you, My Butterfly. You'll always be my endless song.

Love always and forever,
Your one and only Butterfly Weed, Will

But kind of like when you move something on a wall after it's been there for a long time, and its place is bright but everything around it is faded - that's how I feel about her. She wasn't there very long, but when she left, everything around her memory sort of dimmed.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

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.

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.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

I just want you to know that I love you with everything I am - a million times a million and to the moon and back.

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.

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.

Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn't matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.

This is one of the chief differences between a child's experience of a favorite book and an educated adult's. For the adult, a book may be a work of art, possibly a very great one, but for the child reader, certain books are universes. If we are lucky, we retain some of that capacity to be immersed in a story.

There's still is a status-quo group at City Hall who likes things done the old way, behind closed doors.

Here, Fridays were dedicated to the two Bs–Beach and Boats.

The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.

We're all livin' in the past ... we're really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin' ... that's how long it takes our brains to comprehend what's already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I'm not alone. Everyone's livin' in the past, to some extent. I've just become a prisoner of mine ... I've become a prisoner - willingly. But then I guess you really can't be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

His voice had this thick, Charleston accent, where every word had more syllables than ever intended, yet each word seemed as if it had been carefully chosen and presented in a way that only a man born and raised in the heart of the South could–distinguished and from a different time.

And we did it because it's time for City Hall to stop looking out for City Hall and start looking out for the people like you and me who are footing the bill.

Make no mistake, the organizations website counsels. You will be writing a lot of crap. And thats a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. I am not the first person to point out that writing a lot of crap doesnt sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.

If there's one thing I hope people are certain of it's this: I'm looking out for YOU - the taxpayer.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods ... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

Perfect love was that kind of love that made no sense but made everything else make sense somehow. It was raw and unscripted, turbulent and slightly unpredictable.

It's wasteful spending like this that not only forces tax increases and cuts in vital services ... but also really make you wonder: who is City Hall looking out for?

Deep down, we're all some kind of crazy, Ada.

The past isn't always as beautiful as we paint it in our minds.

You are my love of loves, my dream of dreams, my hope of hopes...and I would take the journey all over again because it led me to you, because it's our story–the story of us.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives ... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date - one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone.

I can hazily remember, long ago, having adults - librarians, friends' parents - suggest to me that I liked books "with magic" because I wanted to escape from a reality that, by implication, I lacked the gumption to face.