Andrew Miller Quotes

• “First ambitions are best. We are less brave later.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “Like everyone else in the house, she suffers from dreams.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “She knows about men, knows a good deal of the world's character. But it is hard, whatever you have endured, to give up on love. Hard to stop thinking of it as a home you might one day find again. More than hard.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “The poverty of the villages is almost picturesque from the windows of a coach that is not stopping.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “The visit, like all visits home for a long time now, has been an obscure failure. When is it we cease to be able to go back, truly go back? What secret door is it that closes?”

  Andrew Miller

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• “Why are there no handsome priest in Paris? One has no inclination to confess anything to an ugly man.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “Why did the reindeer fly over the mountain? Answer: Because he couldn't fly under it.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “I’m going to play,’ says Armand, lacing his fingers and cracking the knuckles. ‘A pair of these lads can pump for me.’
  ‘Is this a time for playing?’ asks Jean Baptiste. Then, ‘You are right. You have never been more so.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “Could he not go to hospital?' asks Jean-Baptiste.
  The doctor flares his nostrils. 'Hospitals are very dangerous places. Particularly to one already weakened by illness.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his ciggarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn't up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So, it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed at her through the smoke of his ciggarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying, sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conservatively, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, 'They used flame-throwers, you know'. And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “Everywhere women were insulted with impunity, insulted by men. If a few of them suffered for their insolence as the overseer had, it might be no more than they deserved.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “the wit.’ The Reverend”

  Andrew Miller

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• “polyglot, attempts to draw them into conversation.”

  Andrew Miller

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• “Now he learns that time trails men like a killer,thorough, even-handed, collecting the evidence of the years. Nothing is lost.”

  Andrew Miller

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