Sarah Miller > Quotes

“I'll pretend, I tell myself. Pretending is safer than believing.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“I cross myself and close my eyes. Where we go next, we go together.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“I wish I wasn't an imperial highness or an ex-grand duchess. I'm sick of people doing things to me because of what I am. Girl-in-white-dress. Short-one-with-fringe. Daughter-of-the-tsar. Child-of-the-ex-tyrant. I want people to look and see me, Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, not the caboose on a train of grand duchesses. Someday, I promise myself, no one will be able to hear my name or look at my picture and suppose they know all about me. Someday I will do something bigger than what I am.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“We should be used to it," Tatiana reasons. "There have always been lines separating us from the rest of the world, whether they were satin ribbons or iron rails.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“The pair of us are like salt and sugar: such different flavors, but so close in every other way you could never sort us apart once we're together.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Behind every successful woman are several confused men who give her something to make fun of.”
― Sarah Miller

“My sisters and I sit together on a pair of suitcases. If we've forgotten anything, it's already too late -- our rooms have all been sealed and photographed. Anyway, Tatiana would say it's bad luck to return for something you've forgotten.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“You may be afraid, but you may not let your fear chase you away from what must be done.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Maria cries unashamedly on my shoulder while I whisper and pet her cheek, but Anastasia grips my other hand and stares fiercely back at our Alexander Palace with her wet blue eyes until it is no more than a lemon-colored speck against the sunrise.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Sounds buzz around me, and I'm sure the painted dragonflies have come loose from the frieze on our walls to flap their wings in my ears, making my skin prickle and crawl as tides of sickness wash me away.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“It's commonly believed that there's less pressure on a woman to be married these days than there used to be. If that's true, if things are better now than they were before, then they once must have been very bad indeed.”
― Sarah Miller

“All her life she had longed to breach that pale and hazy boundary between enough and plenty.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“It's different now, like pushing the stop lever on my camera until nothing except the war can squeeze through the lens.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Olga sits on the carpet in front of her shelves with stacks of books scattered around her, struggling to pick between her old favorites. She's all bent over, like a puppet without a hand inside it.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“I'd like to know how anyone can write the truth about us if we've never met.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“All our luxuries won't keep some men from dying -- it can only be a matter of time until I see it happen -- but in our lazaret death will creep silently onto the operating table or nestle between clean sheets.”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Though Wilder blamed her family’s departure from Kansas on “blasted politicians” ordering white squatters to vacate Osage lands, no such edict was issued over Rutland Township during the Ingallses’ tenure there. Quite the reverse is true: only white intruders in what was known as the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma were removed to make way for the displaced Osages arriving from Kansas. (Wilder mistakenly believed that her family’s cabin was located forty—rather than the actual fourteen—miles from Independence, an error that placed the fictional Ingalls family in the area affected by the removal order.) Rather, Charles Ingalls’s decision to abandon his claim was almost certainly financial, for Gustaf Gustafson did indeed default on his mortgage. The exception: Unlike their fictional counterparts, the historical Ingalls family’s decision to leave Wisconsin and settle in Kansas was not a straightforward one. Instead it was the eventual result of a series of land transactions that began in the spring of 1868, when Charles Ingalls sold his Wisconsin property to Gustaf Gustafson and shortly thereafter purchased 80 acres in Chariton County, Missouri, sight unseen. No one has been able to pinpoint with any certainty when (or even whether) the Ingalls family actually resided on that land; a scanty paper trail makes it appear that they actually zigzagged from Kansas to Missouri and back again between May of 1868 and February of 1870. What is certain is that by late February of 1870 Charles Ingalls had returned the title to his Chariton County acreage to the Missouri land dealer, and so for simplicity’s sake I have chosen to follow Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lead, contradicting history by streamlining events to more closely mirror the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie, and setting this novel in 1870, a year in which the Ingalls family’s presence in Kansas is firmly documented.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“When the windowpanes start to turn from black to gray, my sisters cradle themselves around me, rocking me like the sea until I can taste the salt of our tears”
― Sarah Miller, The Lost Crown

“Be thankful for what is given. Caroline heard the words in her mother’s voice. No matter if it is not enough, be thankful.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“we must all learn to do things we don’t want to do. You may be afraid, but you may not let your fear chase you away from what must be done.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“How many miles had they come? Less than halfway, and already Caroline had the sense that a separation such as this could put more than miles between folks, could right this minute be working changes she might not be entirely conscious of and might never realize at all unless she and Eliza saw each other again.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“How different it must feel to be a man: built solid through, with everything beneath the skin belonging solely to yourself. Did he ever envy what she could take into herself, how much she could contain? Could he comprehend all it meant for a woman to hold herself open for her husband, her children?”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“I don’t see how sugar could make that cornbread any sweeter than the prints of your hands already have.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“it was not going she dreaded—only leaving.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“It was not a sack, but rather a circle of denim that would spread itself flat with the cord fully unlaced. Seven deep pockets, each holding one color, pinwheeled from a center humped with plain cuttings of flannel, buckram, and the like.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“vista no wider than their own sunbonnets.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Perfect silence is a safe resort, when such control cannot be attained.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Their trust in her was built of thousands upon thousands of moments already past. She was Ma, and that in itself was enough.”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited

“Little intimidates a man more than a learned woman.”
― Sarah Miller, Marmee

“A woman can resolve that, whatever happens, she will not speak till she can do it in a calm and gentle manner,”
― Sarah Miller, Caroline: Little House, Revisited