The Last List of Mabel Beaumont 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

“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

“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

“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

“We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed.”
― 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

“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

“You can live off so little, can avoid variety and texture. It just makes for a boring life. I don’t want to do it any more.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“There’s so much I want to tell her. Not to waste a second of that precious youth. To hold her family close while she has them. To go after love like it’s a war and she’s losing.”
― 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

“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

“we met, I was grieving, and I had no idea that you were too.’ She shrugs. ‘I think we’re all grieving for something. Our childhoods or a relationship or a dream.”
― 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

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

“wake up in the morning these days and I have to do an assessment of my whole body, try to work out what hurts and how much and whether it was hurting the day before. And then it takes me ten minutes to get up and going.”
― 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

“Because I’ve never really been sure what it was about me that he admired so much.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“was married here,’ I say. He nods, as if he knows. ‘It was spring of 1961, showers on and off all day. But in between, brilliant sunshine. There was a wonderful rainbow.’ ‘A bit like marriage, then,’ he says.”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“look at the cold cup of tea I made for him on the bedside table. Couldn’t bring myself to just make the one. I think of all the tea we’ve drunk, how he’d always say that I made the perfect cup, just how he liked it, though I never did anything special. He was grateful, appreciative. Not just about that but about anything I did for him. About me agreeing to be his, I think. A”
― 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

“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

“the”
― 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

“Or one of them. Me, I’m more about looking back, especially now there’s so much back and so little forward left. What’s wrong”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont

“call him Dad and it felt like the worst kind of betrayal.’ ‘How old were you?’ I ask. ‘Seven, when he died. Probably eight when Tony came on the scene. And he had this daughter, Lou, who was a couple of years older than me. His wife had died, too, so they were both single parents. I can understand, now, that they took comfort from each other, but at the time, I was so angry. It felt like Mum was choosing him over me, and over Dad. Plus he wasn’t very nice to me, never wanted to get involved with anything I was doing. I’ve just… never really been able to forgive them for it.’ ‘So once you were grown up, you cut them out of your life?’ ‘There was never a conscious decision to do that. But while Lou lived with them until she was in her early twenties, I went to university and never moved back. I’d see them now and again, but Tony and I just don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things and every time I’d see them, it was like Mum had moved slightly more towards his way of thinking. We just didn’t seem to have much in common”
― Laura Pearson, The Last List of Mabel Beaumont