Leah Stewart Quotes

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some people see their spouses as separate from them,' Megan says. 'And some people see their spouses as an extension of them, and that informs their attitude and behavior.

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?

I'd always been suspicious of unrelenting sunniness, what it must be working so hard to conceal.

His face became a mirror, and in it I saw a monster version of myself, unleashing my anger like black magic. In front of my children, in front of my neighbors' house. If I'd really been a witch Nathan would have been a column of dust. Not even a lizard, not even a toad. Just nothing. Nothingness,

The world has forgotten that there is more pleasure in wondering than knowing.

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

I was going to click my heels and go home, where life would be, as it is anywhere, a little bit dull Knasas, a little bit great and terrible Oz. I just wanted to stand here for a minute, first, and fix in my memory the life I wasn't choosing, the way Rajiv looked at me before I told him I was leaving, the cottonwood snow.
Nathan watched me, an uncertain look on his perfectly, terribly familiar face.
"Are you ready?" he said

That's just how it is, you know," she said. "Women always choose men over other women.

Even if Megan imagines differently, she [Jennifer] is not the tragic figure. Tommy is. Tommy always was. Nobody saw the tragedy in being the practical one. He was the one who fell painfully short of his potential, the one who even as he let his business flounder and drank too much and showed up late, continued to be though of as a *really great guy.* And he was a really great guy. ... And other people say that, the way he looked at her and all those other things. And so she was the villain. She was the one who didn't laugh at his joke, or looked pained when he gave in to the call to stay for another. She was the one who wanted to leave the party; he was the one who kept it going. The one who wants to leave the party is never the favored one.

Adult friendship doesn't grant you an exclusive, isn't meant to be ranked above romance and family.

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.

All at once it strikes me ... that all you know of a life is the places where it touches your own ... It's strange and diminishing, like looking through a telescope at the stars.

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.

You spend way too much time confusing silence with strength.

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?

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.

Why do people let me speak to them so rudely? If they'd let me get away with less, I might think what I said mattered more.