The Land in Winter Quotes

“The fire burned the camp down but it could not take away what had happened there. The guards, women among them, were brutal idiots, but she knew, even at fourteen, that they would be replaced, that it wasn’t an end to murder at all, that it would go on somewhere else, always keeping a little ahead of the cleansing fire.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“There were side-effects, of course, risks (respiratory arrest), but if his patients died as addicts, they were not first driven mad by pain.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“He left the churns on the wooden loading platform (it was built from old sleepers that wept their tar in summer).”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Her anger, at that precise moment, was absent. The anger, the fear, the shame, the wound that had to be tended like a wayside shrine. And what had replaced them? Only this: the rattling of the little car, the whirr of the heater, the shards of light beyond the edges of the road. A sadness she could live with. Some new interest in herself.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“He was, thought Eric, a man with as close to nothing as made no difference. The inmate of an asylum; someone who could not possibly look back at his life with any kind of pleasure. Yet there was, in the thin light of his winter eyes, a certain slaty grandeur, as if failure had raised him up, had scoured him in a way one might almost envy.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“She was going back to a type of failure and to whatever dull explanations it occasioned. She saw them, she and Eric, either side of the kitchen table, each staring into the dark of themselves to say what no longer really mattered. It was, she supposed, unavoidable. It was what people did, people in their situation. And there was something shaming in that too, their being caught up in what they would once have thought of with contempt, or a shudder, as if considering an illness (the sort one didn’t discuss at table) others might suffer from, but you knew you never would . . .”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“He had expected to feel restless in the house, trapped. Instead he felt a certain pleasure in surrendering to what he could not change.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“And though he was not much given to thinking about love, did not much care for the word, thought it had been worn to a kind of uselessness, gutted by the advertising men and the crooners, and even by politicians, some of whom seemed, recently, to have discovered it, it struck him that in the end it might just mean a willingness to imagine another’s life. To do that. To make the effort.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“what extent was mind just circumstance? Would he begin to think like Mr. Earle, to become like him? But mind must also be the history of circumstance, and his history and Mr. Earle’s could have very few touching points.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“I’m going to be someone who thinks.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Home, it turned out, had been the perfect preparation for not being at home.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“So much dying and nobody really knowing what it was for.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Nothing worse than a woman who was trying.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter

“Time would level it out, for that, he had learned (quite recently), was what time did.”
― Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter