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Image of the quote is loading... SaveSave I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind. - Quote by Sue Miller

I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy…that makes you unkind.

Sue Miller
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But then he returned and our life went on. Three days gone. A week. I measured the time in the faint waning of my consciousness of my misery, and wondered if this would one day be enough: simply not to be consciously miserable anymore.
Sue Miller
A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.
Sue Miller
And then heard Detective Ryan’s pleased voice talking about Eli, about killers who’ve gone free: “They have to tell,” he’d saidWell, apparently so.But why? What is it that comes from the telling?Some of it must be relief, of course. A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.It seems as we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done—and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please
Sue Miller
The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice this, to be grateful for it.
Sue Miller
For it wasn't the secret--the secret that wasn't a secret anyway--that led to austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies.
Sue Miller
And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies.
Sue Miller
People think they know what you're feeling. What you must be feeling. And because it's easier not to expose yourself, what you're truly feeling, you don't disabuse them. You go through the motions for them.
Sue Miller
But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.
Sue Miller
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