Laura Dave

“But Eve - or whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can't see in yourself.”

“...knew each other in that honest, unmitigated way that people get to know you who meet you when you're still young. Before all the rest of it. Before it becomes both easier and harder to know yourself.”

“This is the painful part. 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.”

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

“I was suddenly and completely inundated by it. What had been lost in losing him.”

“A small, inexplicable part of me was scared, right from the start - of counting on someone, of trusting that he'd always be there for me - as much it was exactly what another part of me wanted.”

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

“You have something you want to do. Something you like to do. Something you're good at. Why don't we start with that? Why don't you let that be the entire plan for now?”

“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...”

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

“why people travel far from home-far from where they started. There was, of course, the obvious reason:escape. Escape from the monotony of every day. SO many of us chasing what we wished our everyday existence could be instead. But there was a less obvious and perhaps more important reason. Somewhere, often right in the middle of a trip, you got to believe this was your everyday life. You got to believe you were never going home again.”

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

“Even now, after Nick had caused me pain, the truth was I didn't want to cause him any. Wasn't that love, after all?”

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

“There is a moment in every relationship when you see the whole thing. The question is when does the moment come? Is it the first time you see the person and instinctively know that things between you are going to work out, or fail? Or is it a moment toward the end, however you get there, when you realize that there is something behind this persons eyes that you were never able to touch, no matter how hard you tried?”

“But Eve - ow whoever comes after Eve - cant save him from eventually doing the hard work that comes after that. The work he has never wanted to do, that she spent the better part of her life trying to protect him from having to do. To jump beyond the impasses, the stuck places, to go deeper with someone. You can do the work to honor what you created, or you don't. But if you don't, you get to the same point with the next person, don't you? You get to the same point, the same questioning, until you push through it. Until you are brave enough to not expect anyone else to see in you what you can't see in yourself.”

“...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.”

“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.”

“It seemed to me that the universe was tricky that way--as soon as you didn't need something as badly, as soon as you hold onto the hope of it less tightly, you get a second shot at it.”

“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.”

“I'm not sure we get to choose when or where we find what we're looking for.”

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

“Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable.”

“If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you got there? Didn’t it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?”

“I just think people forget what it feels like to really be in love, you know? Like when that’s the only thing in the world that matters. I just don’t want to decide it’s not that important.”

“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.”

“This wasn’t because he liked me, I was sure. It had more to do with him banking on what we of wedding age had all become witnesses to—how during these wedding weekends, single women, feeling a little lonely, maybe, or just feeling a little too far from being the bride, found themselves loosening their own rules, opting to be more flexible, more quickly.”

“What happened the day I met your father,' she said, 'is that I learned you ave to choose. For better or for worse. You have to choose what your life is going to look like.”

“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.”

“It's harder to appreciate what you don't have to look hard to find.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Someone's affection would give someone else freedom.”

“The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren't there anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You're still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.”

“There are words and there are feelings and somewhere between where the two meet is the truth”

“I couldn't help but wonder if that was what love was -- believing that someone was going to come through, in the end, and that it would still count”

“You can't finish the things you weren't supposed to start.”

“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.”