Leah Stewart

“You spend way too much time confusing silence with strength.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“....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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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. ”

“So Sonia was not my only or even my first best friend. She was the last. It wasn t that I hadn t made friends since just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn t grant you an exclusive isn t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn t imagine ever living that moment again when you say with a shy and hopeful pride You re my best friend. The other person says it back and there you have chosen each other out of everyone else in the world. ”

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

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