Quotes from Laura Dave

Never, never, never could one conceive what love is beforehand, never. —D. H. Lawrence, after meeting his future wife

He was wearing his overalls and these thick work gloves—purple, and ridged. The gloves were a recent purchase. He got them made special in purple because that was my favorite color.

The bigger point for me was that if you were on a trip with someone you didn't love, at the end of it you'd only get to remember what you remembered. But if you went with someone you loved, you'd often get more than that. You'd get to share it with them. You'd get to remember what they remembered too.

I like to think it's another way of saying great things tend to happen all at once.

Did it every occur to you that if you weren't living in fear of other people's opinions of you, no one would have the power to take anything away?

The calm continueth not long without a storm," he said. "You lost me there." "The origin of the expression, the calm before the storm," he said. "From an unknown source in the sixteenth century. But it started a little different than how it's evolved. I like it more. The original idea that the calm can't last, not if you're really living. If you're living fully, the storm's coming to get you.

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

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.

Maybe that's the way everything changes. Just when you finally believe that anything is stable, and will stay the same.

She wanted to only want for her children what they want for themselves, even if she doesn't agree with it, even if she wouldn't hope for that.

Not if she hasn't succeeded in convincing them that she is behind them, no matter what.

Because it puts it ultimately in our hands, doesn't it? What we choose to live with, and what we choose to live without.

She's been told that it takes ten years to figure out what you're doing. Ten years. She takes a breath, smiles. She's ready to get started. With the beginning of it. Her life.

But consider this," Jesse said, picking the bourbon back up, "maybe you aren't in this position because you forgot yourself, but because you started getting honest about who you really might be.

He reached forward and held my face, trying to make me look at him. Except I couldn't look at him and not see all the stories he had kept private about his life this last year. There were breakfasts with Maddie, secret cards and phone calls, a million stories that he hadn't shared--including the story about how much Michelle still loved him. Wasn't the ultimate form of fidelity whom you told your stories to? Ben had stopped telling me his.

He'd called them the could-have-been boys. He raised a glass to them and said, wherever they were, he was grateful to them for not being what I needed, so he got to be the one sitting across from me.

him," he says. "Though I remember him having longer hair. And being much heavier. He looks quite different." "But not entirely?

quoting Steinbeck—Peter said, " 'A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

think, or I used to think at least, 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," I said. "Something that is worth preserving . . ." He

I think, or I used to think at least, 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," I said. "Something that is worth preserving

of how to answer

Part of it is that I recognize in her that thing that happens when you lose your mother. My mother left by choice, Bailey's by tragedy, but it leaves a similar imprint on you either way. It leaves you in the same strange place, trying to figure out how to navigate the world without the most important person watching.

No one else has a clue what you're doing, but at the end of the day, you get to where you want to go.

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.