Quotes by Laura Miller

“Im confident theyll stay if we make the necessary improvements, ... They want more seats, some new paint and a jazzy scoreboard. We invest $25 to $50 million, and well make the Cotton Bowl the premier place to play college football in Texas.”

“We asked, How can we make this a better, fairer way to apply the law? And we made some changes, ... I think weve been very responsive.”

“Its arguably the best, most exciting arts district project in the country.”

“a huge blow for the city.”

“Its very, very troubling, and very subjective and very unfair,”

“Of the eight city budgets Ive worked on, this has by far been the best,”

“It is such a senseless and tragic thing that happened with a terrific young officer,”

“I just cant envision Texas-OU being played anywhere except Dallas, ... Its a magical combination you couldnt re-create anywhere else.”

“This was a stickup game with a toy gun because the Irving offer didnt exist,”

“We get Pomeranians, Pekingese, poodles and Chihuahuas, but most of them have one thing in common: They were found on airport property.”

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

If youve 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, youre even a little suspicious of their claims, because we all know that the books weve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly - or the ones wed most like other people to think we read over and over again.

A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isnt the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesnt look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I dont 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.

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?

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 Lewiss child characters have learned from reading, the right books.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great childrens books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isnt ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if its going to be tempting, and from there its only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

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.

She tries to wear her pain on the inside. She always has. It’s the trademark of the oldest sibling, I think.