Quotes from Leah Stewart

A happy ending isn't really the end. It's just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.

You're not a realist, she says. You're a dreamer who doesn't believe in the dream.

Here was the secret of this house, the thing it took bravery to face -- that to go on loving someone means to over and over again allow the necessary pain.

My father once told me that a happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story. So this is where I choose to stop. More things are still going to happen, of course, some good, some bad. Some things never get any better. When people die they stay dead. None of us knows why we love, or why we stop loving, or why everyone we love we lose.

Once you know the end of the story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it.

and I'll know that this is what you live for - to hear someone say. Let's go home, to hear someone you love call your name.

A happy ending is just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.

The thing is, you make choices. You do some things and you don't do others and in the end there's not much point in asking what different choices might have gained you, and lost you, unless you have a time machine. You become those choices, you embody them... I'd known I couldn't stay, just as I'd known years before I couldn't be with him, even as I'd gone on pretending I had a choice. I was who I was, and I wanted what I already had.

Will and I will walk along the beach in Gloucester, and I'll hear him shout over the wind, Cameron, let's go home, and I'll know that this is what you live for --to hear someone say, Let's go home, to hear someone you love call your name.

The first time you fall in love, it's like you've created the first love in the universe, and the first time someone you love dies, you grieve the universe's first death. What does it help to be told that what you feel is nothing new?

And Josh wanted to tell her what he knew: that love might look like a shore but turn out to be a desert island, where you roamed alone, talking to yourself, trying to crack open coconuts with your shoe. So thirsty you drank the salt water. So hungry you ate the sand.

That's just how it is, you know, she said. Women always choose men over other women.

Every so often they exchanged these quick, knowing glances, each making sure the other one was still there, still with her. I wondered how long their friendship would last, and I felt sorry for them, because they didn't know it wouldn't.

I tried to resist the urge to reach for my camera. I tried to look, really look, as though this took an effort far greater than the movement of my eyes. You are here, I would say to myself, no part of this moment is melting into the future. You are only here and nowhere else. But I could never believe it. So I would take a photo to stop the world. So that I could keep moving

attraction, that's the farthest thing from an idea. That's an urge, an impulse, a force. It's subconscious, physical. You can't make everything cerebral.

A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you're from, especially if you're from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.

You spend way too much time confusing silence with strength.

I'd always been suspicious of unrelenting sunniness, what it must be working so hard to conceal.

You like being in love with someone who's not going to love you back." She opened her eyes. He looked at her. "Why would I like that?" she asked. He shrugged. "I don't know.

I want to be alone. I don't want to be alone. My days pop like bubbles. There is no one to remember the things that have happened to me.

They say there's peace if you can relinquish desire. For me desire's absence has only ever left a dull persistent ache.

Adult friendship doesn't grant you an exclusive, isn't meant to be ranked above romance and family.

people are much more interesting when they have a bit of a bite. We

between what you thought you wanted and what you wanted? Why did people have to be such a danger to themselves? She had had reasons for her choices. Good