Laura Dave

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.

I didn't know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters.

We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job

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.

Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?

You think if you don__ talk about it, you can just pretend everything is all right? Everything is not all right. Not with us, not with your parents, not with anything today. And if you let yourself go anywhere real with it, you have to acknowledge it.

People don__ break up because someone__ family is a little . . . messy. If that were the case, no one would ever get married.

Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?

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.

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.

Beauty won__ protect you. Not in the end. What will is the one thing you can__ plan for. The one thing you can__ save for or search for or even find. It has to find you and decide to stay. Time. More of it. More of it to try and make things right.

Wasn't that the gift of a home? You looked at it the same way, but then when you needed it to, it showed you all over again the many ways you'd been during the time you had been living there. The many ways it brought you back to yourself. The many ways it still brought you back to yourself.

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.

More than one thing is never true. People love to say the opposite, love to talk about inner conflict, nuances, levels of complication. But if this last year has taught her anything, it has taught her that people are clearer on what they want than they admit to themselves. They want something, or they don__. They decide to keep working at a relationship or they give up. They love someone or they love someone else. And if they love someone else, it is often the idea that they love most, especially when they haven__ learned enough to figure out that this new person probably won__ save them either.