Laura Miller quotes:

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.

Others like City Hall the old way, when they could make deals behind closed doors with your tax money.

There's still is a status-quo group at City Hall who likes things done the old way, behind closed doors.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

And we did it because it's time for City Hall to stop looking out for City Hall and start looking out for the people like you and me who are footing the bill.

Together, often by unanimous vote, the council has worked quickly to get positive results.

It's wasteful spending like this that not only forces tax increases and cuts in vital services... but also really make you wonder: who is City Hall looking out for?

From my very first day in the Mayor's office, I have worked closely with the Council members who share our vision of a city hall that really protects taxpayers and cares... yes... about the little things that make a big difference in people's lives.

Given the way some fought for the status quo when I authored the new Ethics Code and created the city's first Ethics Commission, we are going to need your strong support to get an even tougher Ethics Code passed this year.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

But despite the challenges, I love being your Mayor.

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

Every small town that I had ever been to had had a caboose.

Adventure ... is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

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

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

Make no mistake, the organizations website counsels. You will be writing a lot of crap. And thats a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. I am not the first person to point out that writing a lot of crap doesnt sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.

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.

Nonfiction brought me back to earth and sobered me up whenever it seemed like I'd become too drunk on the lives and loves of imaginary people, but that doesn't mean it was any less thrilling or transporting, although it was often more illuminating.

Perfect love was that kind of love that made no sense but made everything else make sense somehow. It was raw and unscripted, turbulent and slightly unpredictable.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with...

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

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [...] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold!

We spend so much of our passion on our first love. I'm not convinced that it-passion-is one of those things that you have an endless amount of-like happiness or sadness. I could be happy all day. I could be sad all day. But I'm not so sure I'll ever love like that again.

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing.

There is so much chaos and dysfunction going on with the federal government that Dallas can't wait any longer for federal help.