Laura Dave

“Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?”

“I didn't know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters.”

“There are different ways to be confused about how someone's disappointed you. Some lie about the future because they wanted to forget the past. But some will lie about the past because they think it will give you both a future.”

“Belief isn't supposed to make sense, at least not all the time. In that, it finds its power. It gets to creep up on you and carry you forward. Until you can carry yourself again.”

“You think if you don’t talk about it, you can just pretend everything is all right? Everything is not all right. Not with us, not with your parents, not with anything today. And if you let yourself go anywhere real with it, you have to acknowledge it.”

“Love doesn't leave you. Not all at once. It creeps back in, making you think it can be another way, that it can still be another way, and you have to remind yourself of the reasons that it probably won't be.”

“These things...they are who you are. They brought you here. To this day. You didn't give me a chance to understand that ever the unattractive parts of you, the messy parts, were something I could accept.”

“Wasn't that the gift of a home? You looked at it the same way, but then when you needed it to, it showed you all over again the many ways you'd been during the time you had been living there. The many ways it brought you back to yourself. The many ways it still brought you back to yourself.”

“Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone.What happened in their first five minutes?Time stopped.”

“People don’t break up because someone’s family is a little . . . messy. If that were the case, no one would ever get married.”

“We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job”

“Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?”

“More than one thing is never true. People love to say the opposite, love to talk about inner conflict, nuances, levels of complication. But if this last year has taught her anything, it has taught her that people are clearer on what they want than they admit to themselves. They want something, or they don’t. They decide to keep working at a relationship or they give up. They love someone or they love someone else. And if they love someone else, it is often the idea that they love most, especially when they haven’t learned enough to figure out that this new person probably won’t save them either.”