Laura Miller

“I gave him a piece of my heart a long time ago, and once you give that away, I’ve learned you don’t so easily get it back.”

“A part of me will probably always be waitin’ for her. And even when I get to the end of this life and she’s not there, I think I’ll still just wait. It’s the cruel reality of love, I think—that once you find it, it’s yours to carry. And even if you lose it and never find it back again, I think you still just keep on carrying it...and waitin’—long after the curtain closes.”

“But kind of like when you move something on a wall after it’s been there for a long time, and its place is bright but everything around it is faded—that’s how I feel about her. She wasn’t there very long, but when she left, everything around her memory sort of dimmed.”

“We’re all livin’ in the past...we’re really always eighty milliseconds behind life happenin’. ...that’s how long it takes our brains to comprehend what’s already taken place right in front of our eyes. So, I guess I’m not alone. Everyone’s livin’ in the past, to some extent. I’ve just become a prisoner of mine. ... I’ve become a prisoner—willingly. But then I guess you really can’t be called a prisoner if you willingly carry the chains.”

“Words are great, but even I can admit they have certain short-comings. No word can ever give justice to a smile from a man who never smiled or to an old woman who gives up her seat on the bus to a soldier who lost his leg. And I’m still convinced there’s no word out there for the feeling you get the first time you ever hit home plate or bury your first dog or muster up enough courage to tell a girl you love her.”

“The past isn’t always as beautiful as we paint it in our minds.”

“I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life—the one I feel as though I’ve abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn’t perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every soft whisper, every spoken word, every gentle touch—it’s all perfect. Time won’t let me see it otherwise. They’re all just perfect memories—perfect, untouchable moments that came and went so softly that they almost feel as if they were always just a dream.”

“Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date—one that you can’t see until she tells you she’s leaving, and then she’s gone.”

“Big events, small, mundane moments of the day–it doesn’t matter; the past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.”

“Life didn’t go how I had planned, but I couldn’t have planned a better life. Somewhere in between the beginning and eternity, I fought the war that we all must fight–the journey that in taking, forces us to come face to face with our own realities.”

“She always used to say that the past is a relentless parasite in its quest, feeding off of the senses, looking for anything that will trigger a memory–forever there to complicate the present, forever there to remind us that it will always be a piece of us. I never had a clue as to what she meant, until now.”

“Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.”

“The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.”

“She was also a memory, the worst kind of memory--the kind that pulled you to your knees at just the sound of her name.”