The World Below Quotes

“I dreamed of my grandparents living there as though they always had with their habits, their rituals, their ways of speaking. With the illusory sense I had as a girl, when my own world was so fragile, that they always would be there. That they would always welcome me and care for me. That they were a place I could always go. A homeland”
― Sue Miller, The World Below

“Even at that age, though, I knew that what had happened to my mother had nothing to do with anyone in our family-with anyone else at all. If I had learned one useful lesson from living with a person so disturbed, it was that some illnesses—and to me, palpably, hers—are driven by something internal, something that goes profoundly and horribly awry. My mother, I could have told you, was just different when she was ill. Things were deeply, chemically disturbed in her in a way that even the most misbegotten parenting couldn’t have produced. And I didn’t understand my grandmother’s parenting—even Rue’s version of it—to have been that misbegotten.”
― Sue Miller, World Below

“She knew her Freud—or at least the distortion of Freud that held parents, mothers in particular, accountable for all pathology in their children.”
― Sue Miller, World Below

“She might have said, “Oh, Rue. She was half in love with Daddy. No wonder she always found fault with Mother.”
― Sue Miller, World Below

“Song of the Lark,”
― Sue Miller, World Below