Miller's Valley Quotes

“But no one ever leaves the town where they grew up, not really, even if they go.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What's tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“Maybe everyone stays the same inside, even when their life looks nothing like what they once had, or even imagined.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“I was good with being alone, always liked it, but there's something about doing a job alone that you've always done with someone else that just doesn't feel right. Maybe it's like making Christmas cookies by yourself. There's nothing wrong with it in theory, but you're really supposed to be doing it with other people, and not just any other people.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“There weren't really any new immigrants in Miller's Valley at all. You could tell by their last names that people who lived in the area were originally from Germany or Poland or some of the Slavic countries, but they'd been Americans long enough to have flat vowels and made-up minds. When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller's Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn't risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“barn kittens scattered before his boots like dandelion fluff.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“It's a lot harder to save people than you think it is.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“I looked around and it was like I was seeing everything frozen into a still photograph, like I was seeing my whole life but in one of those shots you look and later think, Yeah, that's what it was like, once upon a time. Once upon a time ago.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“It's so easy to be wrong about the things you're close to. I know that now. I learned that then.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition. —JAMES BALDWIN”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still got fixed instead of just junked. If”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What’s tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil. I”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller’s Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn’t risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all. Maybe”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“Hmmm,” my mother said, like she did when I gave her a composition to read and she was going to tell me to take another shot at it.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“it’s strange little moments that live inside you and keep peeking out the windows that open suddenly in your mind.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“She never sounded pleased about beef noodle casserole or chicken à la king, either, but she did seem to perk up at pork chops and ham. I guess she was a pig girl.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“Charm is like tinsel without the tree. What’s tinsel without the tree? Shredded tinfoil.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“Sometimes I went out into the cornfield and walked between the rows with my eyes closed, pretending I was blind, feeling the stalks reaching out to brush me like a pat on the back.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“The difference between fifty and sixty is nothing; the difference between eight and eighteen is more or less a lifetime.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“When you look back on your life there are always times that you remember as the hard times, even if they're the hard times a girl has, not the hard times of a woman, with grief and loss and real hardship.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“valley? That should be interesting for you.” “I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet.” “I’d be happy to help,” Mr. Bally said. “I’m an expert on the subject you’re studying.” He picked up one of the microfilm boxes. “Judges in these contests like primary sources.” I knew that. Judges in these contests always liked primary sources. I was already using one. “Tell me about Andover,” I’d said to Cissy Langer, sitting in her back room with a wall full of piggy dolls staring at me. “Oh, my goodness, Mimi, what a question,” she’d said. I took the glass of iced tea, and I took the plate of chocolate chip cookies, and I set my tape recorder between them. I’d borrowed it from the school librarian. “I’ve already got some primary sources,” I said to Winston Bally in the conference room. We all pick and choose the things we talk about, I guess. I’d listened to my mother and Cissy talk about growing up together for maybe hundreds of hours, about sharing a seat and red licorice ropes on the bus, about getting licked for wearing their Sunday dresses into the woods one day, about the years when they both moved back in with their parents while their husbands went to war. And somehow I’d never really noticed that all the stories started when they were ten, that there were no stories about the four-year-old Miriam, the six-year-old Cissy, about the day when they were both seven when Ruth came home from the hospital, a bundle of yellow crochet yarn and dirty diaper. It made sense, I guess, since it turned out Cissy had grown up in a place whose name I’d never even heard because it had been wiped off the map before I’d ever even been born. “My whole family lived in Andover,” Cissy said. “My mother and”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“it seem like he was training for the Olympics and I was the gold medal. No one had ever acted like I was the gold medal before, or not so I’d noticed. But”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley