Quotes from Leah Stewart

Why was it so hard to tell the difference between what you thought you wanted and what you wanted? Why did people have to be such a danger to themselves?

The world has forgotten that there is more pleasure in wondering than knowing.

He thought of asking her, but for no reason he could name, the silence between them seemed too hard to break.

His face became a mirror, and in it I saw a monster version of myself, unleashing my anger like black magic. In front of my children, in front of my neighbors' house. If I'd really been a witch Nathan would have been a column of dust. Not even a lizard, not even a toad. Just nothing. Nothingness

Why do people let me speak to them so rudely? If they'd let me get away with less, I might think what I said mattered more.

She couldn't be sure that everything she knew about herself was portable.

If he'd lived I might have married him and had a passel of brats and a dog. Who wants that happy ending?" "A lot of people." "It's bullshit." "Yes," she said. "I know.

She could have made different choices, but all that mattered were the ones she'd made.

I was going to click my heels and go home, where life would be, as it is anywhere, a little bit dull Knasas, a little bit great and terrible Oz. I just wanted to stand here for a minute, first, and fix in my memory the life I wasn't choosing, the way Rajiv looked at me before I told him I was leaving, the cottonwood snow. Nathan watched me, an uncertain look on his perfectly, terribly familiar face. "Are you ready?" he said

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.

We will all satisfy our curiosity when we can, which is any time we think no one will catch us.

Some people see their spouses as separate from them,' Megan says. 'And some people see their spouses as an extension of them, and that informs their attitude and behavior.

When you're young you have to invent tasks to fill the time, while I can kill an hour just making myself some tea. She

How they'd started out so much in love, and how things had slowly gone wrong, and how she'd tried, she'd tried, she'd tried. How whenever she resolved to leave Tommy, she'd succumb to sorrow and nostalgia, yes, but mostly she could just never resist her stupid, primal attraction to him, and one of those times they'd conceived Milo.

I don't have to wonder where he he, what he's doing, or who. I don't have to worry about all the ways he'll scar my son. I don't have to watch myself give in again and again, audience to my own relentless weakness. I thought if he were gone I wouldn't hate myself so much, which isn't true, as it turns out, but still his absence is as close as I can get to freedom. There's a certain clearheadedness now, there's a kind of lonely clarity--

and since I was bound to screw them up, my only hope was to screw them up in a sufficiently dramatic way, a way that led to a best-selling memoir, so they could make big bucks in the psychological freak show circuit.