Leah Stewart > Quotes

“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. ”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“A happy ending isn't really the end. It's just the place where you choose to stop telling the story.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“You're not a realist," she says. "You're a dreamer who doesn't believe in the dream.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“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. ”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“Once you know the end of the story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“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.”
― Leah Stewart

“....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.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

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

“The first time you fall in love, it's like you've created the first love in the universe, and the first time someone you love dies, you grieve the universe's first death. What does it help to be told that what you feel is nothing new?”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“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.”
― Leah Stewart, Husband and Wife

“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.”
― Leah Stewart

“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.”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us

“That's just how it is, you know," she said. "Women always choose men over other women.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“Every so often they exchanged these quick, knowing glances, each making sure the other one was still there, still with her. I wondered how long their friendship would last, and I felt sorry for them, because they didn't know it wouldn't.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“attraction, that's the farthest thing from an idea. That's an urge, an impulse, a force. It's subconscious, physical. You can't make everything cerebral.”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us

“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”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“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.”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us

“I was traumatizing her. I could only hope that at three she was too young to retain any of this in memory, that in the years to follow I could make up for any future need for therapy I was creating now. Could I? Or would she always have a deep insecurity, the kind that send people careening from one disastrous romance to the next? And why did I have to live my life obsessed with these kinds of concerns, this constant attempt to control the most uncertain of outcomes, my own effect on someone else's mind?”
― Leah Stewart, Husband and Wife

“A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us

“You spend way too much time confusing silence with strength.”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us

“I’d always been suspicious of unrelenting sunniness, what it must be working so hard to conceal.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“between what you thought you wanted and what you wanted? Why did people have to be such a danger to themselves? She had had reasons for her choices. Good”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us: A Novel

“Adult friendship doesn’t grant you an exclusive, isn’t meant to be ranked above romance and family.”
― Leah Stewart, The Myth of You and Me

“The world has forgotten that there is more pleasure in wondering than knowing.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“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?”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us: A Novel

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

“They say there's peace if you can relinquish desire. For me desire's absence has only ever left a dull persistent ache.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“I want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone. My days pop like bubbles. There is no one to remember the things that have happened to me.”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“people are much more interesting when they have a bit of a bite. We”
― Leah Stewart, The New Neighbor

“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.”
― Leah Stewart, The History of Us: A Novel