Laura Miller

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

Big events, small, mundane moments of the day__t doesn__ matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present__f you let it.

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__orever 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.

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

I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life__he one I feel as though I__e abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn__ perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch__t__ all perfect. Time won__ let me see it otherwise. They__e all just perfect memories__erfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream.

The past isn__ always as beautiful as we paint it in our minds.

A part of me will probably always be waitin_ for her. And even when I get to the end of this life and she__ not there, I think I__l still just wait. It__ the cruel reality of love, I think__hat once you find it, it__ yours to carry. And even if you lose it and never find it back again, I think you still just keep on carrying it...and waitin___ong after the curtain closes.

We__e all livin_ in the past...we__e really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin_. ...that__ how long it takes our brains to comprehend what__ already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I__ not alone. Everyone__ livin_ in the past, to some extent. I__e just become a prisoner of mine. ... I__e become a prisoner__illingly. But then I guess you really can__ be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains.

But kind of like when you move something on a wall after it__ been there for a long time, and its place is bright but everything around it is faded__hat__ how I feel about her. She wasn__ there very long, but when she left, everything around her memory sort of dimmed.

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date__ne that you can__ see until she tells you she__ leaving, and then she__ gone.

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.

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__ still convinced there__ 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.

Litchat, however, is singleminded. Seemingly, it can only conceive of a writer__ 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__e know next to nothing, after all__ut 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.

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

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.

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.

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.

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?