Laura Dave > Quotes

“This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn't with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me, I was scared that the wrong person would stay.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“This is the thing about good and evil. They aren't so far apart - and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It’s more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you’d never before been. Home. When you weren’t sure you’d ever get to have one.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“There are parts I wish didn’t exist, parts I can’t look away from now. In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Most people don't want to hear the thing that will make it work better... They want to hear what will make it easier.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“The could-have been boys still love you.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“People don’t tend to work that way. We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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”
― Laura Dave, London is the Best City in America

“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.”
― Laura Dave, London is the Best City in America

“Which is when I understand, in a flash, what I’ve been doing wrong with her—what I’ve been doing wrong in how I’ve been trying to connect with her. I thought if I were nice enough, sweet enough, she’d understand she could count on me. But that’s not how you learn you can count on someone. You learn it in the moments when everyone’s too tired to be sweet, too tired to try hard. You learn it by what they do for you then.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Einstein said, So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“We forget all sorts of things that no one helps us remember,”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again. And you see it with a stark quality: This is what is required of you now, just to get along.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“That sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Maybe we are all fools, one way or another, when it comes to seeing the totality of the people who love us—the people we try to love.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Sometimes your passion takes work and you shouldn't give up on it just because it isn't easy...

[Owen Michaels, as quoted by daughter Bailey]”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“You can't finish the things you weren't supposed to start.”
― Laura Dave, London is the Best City in America

“Watching my grandfather work taught me that not everything was fluid. There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on. You did the work that was needed, wherever that work took you.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“Even if things didn’t always go the way they should, sometimes they went exactly where they needed to.”
― Laura Dave, Eight Hundred Grapes

“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?”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“You cannot make a deal with the devil and expect it to turn out okay.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Owen isn’t who I thought he was, at least not in the details. There are parts I wish didn’t exist, parts I can’t look away from now. In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. We don’t turn away from the parts of someone we don’t want to see. However quickly or long it takes to see them. We accept them if we are strong enough. Or we accept them enough to not let the bad parts become the entire story.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“I'm not sure we get to choose when or where we find what we're looking for.”
― Laura Dave, The First Husband

“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.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party

“It's harder to appreciate what you don't have to look hard to find.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party