Quotes by Laura Miller

When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile.Laura Miller - Butterfly Weeds

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

because we all know that the books we’ve loved best are seldom the ones we esteem the most highly

There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.

I can see how James or Greene might agree with this point of view: the former finds that the ugly old lamp no longer produces a genie when rubbed and the latter realizes he has nothing left to wish for.

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.