Quotes from Laura Dave

Sometimes your passion takes work and you shouldn't give up on it just because it isn't easy... [Owen Michaels, as quoted by daughter Bailey]

We loved each other in the same difficult, unusable way where you took turns doing it, instead of ever managing to do it at the same time.

You cannot make a deal with the devil and expect it to turn out okay.

It's never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It's only about figuring out how to get there.

When everything gets messy and brutal and complicated, the truth is the first thing to go, isn't it?

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

Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.

This is the thing about good and evil. They aren't so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.

that real love comes over time, once that initial draw you're talking about takes on a different form. When you get to understand there is something more concrete between you. Something that is worth preserving...

People screw up, you know. You shouldn't hold it against them. You shouldn't expect everyone to know everything you're thinking about or not getting from them. It doesn't mean they don't love you. They screw up. -Bobby

maybe just once in this life someone loves us for the us we don't even know how to be yet. And if we lose him too early--in the name of all the promises in the world: a new job, a new city, an old love offering us happily ever after--we may just lose that chance to be our best self.

The calm can't last, not if you're really living. if you're living fully, the storms coming to get you.

you fill in the blanks—with stories and memories from the people who love you.

Each species of wood has its own distinctive patterns and colors, which are revealed when the bowl is turned. —Philip Moulthrop

That's the brutality of a breakup, isn't it? The people leaving think they did everything possible, the people left behind think what is possible hasn't even been tested yet.

there are certain things we can't erase, certain things that we reveal to the people closest to us despite what we may or may not know we are telling them. [Hannah Hall]

It's a terrible thing to know everything about someone long after you want to.

I don't think you get to be mad at someone unless they come through for you. I don't think you have that luxury. I think you think you can be mad, but really you're just doing something else. What's that? Waiting.

That was what I feared most: that he just wasn't excited about us anymore—that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn't sleep facing me anymore, or the way he'd stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count.

Sometimes you don't know it. What you have been waiting your whole life for. You don't know until it is happening.

When you're willing to do the work, it's amazing what can be saved.

But men can forget. If too much time goes by, they can forget what they have. How much they want what they have.

But it is an amazing thing to be with someone who really sees you -Jen

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.