Laura Pearson > Quotes

“I’ve always loved that about reading. Being able to experience a different time or place, but mostly getting a chance to experience being a different person altogether.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“It’s been just the two of us for so many years. People don’t talk much about marriages without children, about the intensity of them. No one else in the house to act as a buffer, to force you to come together after an argument.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer. You carry each loved one you lose, and they stack up, and it becomes unbearable. I tick them off in my mind. Brother, father, mother, husband, and my friend, my love.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“You can’t live in the past, I tell myself, but you can visit. And you can bring bits of it into the present, when you need them.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“Because the death of the person you spent your whole life with is one thing, but the death of the person you didn’t? Sometimes, that’s the real tragedy.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“The house feels different when he’s not in it, as if all our furniture and belongings settle and wait, like a breath held.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“How much time have I wasted, over the years, caring about the thoughts of people I don’t know and never will?”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“Sometimes I cry, both for the loss of him and for the loss of all those years. For the life I didn’t live. All the lives I didn’t live. We only get to choose one, after all.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“My little corner of the world is emptying out. I have to wonder why I’m still here.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“Do you remember it, Mabel? All the emotions. God, I don’t miss being young.’ I do. I remember it, but unlike Julie, I do miss it. The way my body moved however and wherever I wanted it to, the way I felt like there was more life ahead than behind, the way people noticed me. Would I do it all again? I would, but I’d do it differently.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“You’re never going to live in Nashville or Hong Kong.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“Sometimes it feels like the world is unimaginably big, and other times it feels like you could hold it in your hand.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“Both of us have lived a whole life in those years, and we might not fit together the way we once did.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“a risk, a gamble. But isn’t everything? Isn’t marriage, and career, and friendship? Isn’t love? Isn’t getting on a bus, on a sharply cold late winter day, to look for a woman who might have known a girl who was once your best friend?”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“Have you heard of Facebook?’ she asks. I roll my eyes. Has anyone not heard of Facebook? ‘I’m eighty-six, I’m not dead.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“When you’re young and you’re a woman,’ I say, ‘everyone’s interested in you. In what you look like and what you’ve got to say. And then there’s a point in your life, around fifty or so, when it all stops and you become invisible. And it’s stupid, really, because by then you have much more interesting things to contribute to the conversation, but no one wants to hear them. I’ve come to terms with it, it happened to me a long time ago, but since my husband died, some days I don’t speak to anyone, and I feel like no one can see me, and I think I wanted to test that.’ She”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“But you know, there’s something wonderful about being a stepparent too.”
― Laura Pearson, The Many Futures of Maddy Hart

“Go for both,’ I say. ‘Always both. Then later, if you have to, you can start making compromises or choosing between them. But right now, reach for everything.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“She wanted to have something for after they were grown up and gone, something more than an empty house and regrets.”
― Laura Pearson, The Life She Could Have Lived

“How my life turns out is down to me and no one else.”
― Laura Pearson, The Many Futures of Maddy Hart

“When I said yes, and I was screaming no inside, I thought I was doing the best I could for him. But now I’m not so sure.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“I get my book out and step into someone else’s life for an hour, someone young and rich and full of energy. I’ve always loved that about reading. Being able to experience a different time or place, but mostly getting a chance to experience being a different person altogether.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“And yet. She felt like she’d forgotten who she was. And worse than that, she felt like she’d stopped being herself entirely.”
― Laura Pearson, The Life She Could Have Lived

“It was a different time. When love was sometimes treated as a crime.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer. You carry each loved one you lose, and they stack up, and it becomes unbearable.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“We don’t know we’re born, do we?”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“And I wondered, was marriage always like this, with so many truths hidden beneath the conversation you were having? So much hiding, and pretending.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont