Monogamy Quotes

“Love isn't just what two people have together, it's what two people make together, so of course, it's never the same.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn’t just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence.” She smiled at Edith. “I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the meaninglessness of death.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“She’d thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn’t a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“He’d taught her something tonight. Taught her almost painlessly. Almost. She’d thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn’t a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with. She felt small, and foolish, exposed.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Images that worked like memory, she thought. The way memory is triggered by objects. The way objects, spaces, the arrangements of things, can call up those who aren’t there, can give life to them again.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“But in the moment he imagined it as directed at him, connected to all the changes he’d made and wanted to make in his life, to who he wanted to be; and his impulse was to try to be sure she didn’t somehow slip away.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Her sister’s comment made her begin to wonder: maybe instead of her work fostering in her a certain tendency toward remoteness—or even creating that sense of remoteness—maybe she’d been remote from the start. Maybe she’d become a photographer to find a way of living with that.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“After a minute, he said, “And what about your mother? What’s she like? Not unkind, I’m sure.” He pulled his head back to look at her, and she smiled at him, at how beautiful she felt he was. “Oh no, she is, very kind. But her kindness . . . it takes a different form. My mother . . . she wants to solve your problems. Or she wants you to solve your problems. She can’t . . . sit with you. In your misery. It’s too hard for her.” She changed her voice, made it brusque. “‘Let’s. Make. This. Better!”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“She had read the same sentence over and over, and each time she lifted her eyes to look at Graham, he was always there, looking back at her. The wait had seemed endless to her, but finally the lights blinked off and on several times, and the store began to empty out.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Love isn’t just what two people have together, it’s what two people make together, so of course, it’s never the same.”)”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Maybe the passing of time had made a monogamous man of Graham.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“to the present, that this was”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“course, it’s never the same.”)”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“I'd be a bad bet even if there there no Annie, Rosemary. I would have been. I'm just not good at saying no. I want–I always want to say yes. And I want to want to say yes. To everything. I'm a greedy person. More or less bottomlessly hungry.' He thinks of babies again.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Do you remember his argument about fiction?" Annie asked. "About narrative? Another big theory."

"I don't. Probably I wasn't at that party."

"Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel ... consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn't just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequences." She smiled at Edith. "I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the meaninglessness of death.”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“announcement”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill,”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy

“Just, that we read fiction because it suggests that life has a shape, and we feel . . . consoled, I think he said, by that notion. Consoled to think that life isn’t just one damned thing after another. That it has sequence and consequence.” She smiled at Edith. “I think it was more or less the idea that fictional narrative made life seem to matter, that it pushed away the”
― Sue Miller, Monogamy