70 Quotes by Laura Dave

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.

I’d been wrong about the ways we move past the versions of ourselves that no longer fit. I’d thought it involved running, as far and as fast as your feet could carry you, from your former selves. I didn’t understand that was the surest way to wind up exactly where you started. 44 In the morning, I looked out the window, feeling foggy and damp, like I’d had a bottle of wine the night before.

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.

People don’t tend to work that way. We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.

That was what I feared most: that he just wasn’t excited about us anymore – that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn’t sleep facing me anymore, or the way he’d stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count.

People get more work done when they don’t talk.

There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on.

My father never measured success the way he did – reaching the top-top of something, as if there was an objective tip-top. My father measured it by how well you figured out what you wanted for your life – what you needed to be happy” -Georgia.

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.