Laura Dave Quotes

Laura Dave

Laura Dave is an American novelist and New York Times bestselling author of The Last Thing He Told Me, Eight Hundred Grapes and other novels. (Laura Dave Quotes)

“A small, inexplicable part of me was scared, right from the start – of counting on someone, of trusting that he’d always be there for me – as much it was exactly what another part of me wanted.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Be careful what you give up…because eventually, you get it back any way you can.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Beauty won’t protect you. Not in the end. What will is the one thing you can’t plan for. The one thing you can’t 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.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“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.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“But I knew the other part wasn’t about me, so I decide not to make it about me now. It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about figuring out how to get there.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“But if you went with someone you loved, you’d often get more than that. You’d get to share it with them. You’d get to remember what they remembered too.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“But it is an amazing thing to be with someone who really sees you” -Jen”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“But men can forget. If too much time goes by, they can forget what they have. How much they want what they have.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Did it every occur to you that if you weren’t living in fear of other people’s opinions of you, no one would have the power to take anything away?”
Laura Dave
Hello, Sunshine

“Each species of wood has its own distinctive patterns and colors, which are revealed when the bowl is turned. —Philip Moulthrop”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“Einstein said, So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“Even if things didn’t always go the way they should, sometimes they went exactly where they needed to.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Even now, after Nick had caused me pain, the truth was I didn’t want to cause him any. Wasn’t that love, after all?”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Fate suggests no agency. Synchronization is all about agency. It involves all systems running in a state where different parts of the system are almost, if not precisely, ready.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Going to find what he was looking for there. “Would you feel better if I told you I had some great photography opportunities”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Growing up is never idyllic, is it? Or it’d be called something else.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Gwyn looks up at her daughter, makes her meet her eyes. “What I think is that there is no good way or bad way. And the sooner we let go of expectations about how things are supposed to go, the happier we get to be.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“He never understood that I wasn’t scared of someone leaving me, I was scared that the wrong person would stay.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“How do you begin to grapple with the idea that your husband is running from the person he used to be, a person whose real name you don’t even know? You want to argue that someone is getting the story wrong. Someone is getting your story wrong. In your story, the one you know by heart, none of this makes sense. Not where this story began, not where it’s going. And certainly not where it’s threatening to end.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for your whole life? Do you call it fate? It feels lazy to call it fate. It’s more like finding your way home—where home is a place you secretly hoped for, a place you imagined, but where you’d never before been. Home. When you weren’t sure you’d ever get to have one.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“I couldn’t help but wonder if that was what love was – believing that someone was going to come through, in the end, and that it would still count”
Laura Dave
London is the Best City in America

“I didn’t know yet that you can always find that perfect moment right before everything shatters.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“I don’t think you get to be mad at someone unless they come through for you. I don’t think you have that luxury. I think you think you can be mad, but really you’re just doing something else.”
Laura Dave
London is the Best City in America

“I feel like I’m in one of those twisted dreams that only happen when you go to sleep at the wrong time, the afternoon sun or midnight chill greeting you upon waking, disorienting you – and leaving you to turn to the person next to you, the person you trust most, looking for clarity.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“I had never seen anyone concentrate like that on anything. It was like watching love.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“I hear the crazy. She sounds crazy. Maybe that’s what happens when the bottom falls out, you lose the ability to modulate—to make your words make sense to the rest of the world.” (Laura Dave Quotes)
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“I stopped paying attention to her. I stopped doing the things that someone does for the person he loves. Because I was tired. Because other things always seemed to matter a little bit more.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“I think it’s a good thing to know what you want. If you do, you have a chance of getting it. If you don’t, you have a chance of getting only what someone else wants you to have.”
Laura Dave
Hello, Sunshine

“I was suddenly and completely inundated by it. What had been lost in losing him.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“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. In the morning, I looked out the window, feeling foggy and damp, like I’d had a bottle of wine the night before.”
Laura Dave
Hello, Sunshine

“I’ll just assume that whatever your mother did wrong, she did one thing great. That’s you. She figured it out enough to make you. I can overlook the rest. And you can have the freedom to feel whatever you want toward her. With no judgment.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“I’d learned early on that people stay away if they think you’re struggling. They don’t want the stink to fall on them too.”
Laura Dave
Hello, Sunshine

“If looks could kill, I might have killed him.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“I’m not sure we get to choose when or where we find what we’re looking for.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. 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.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“It feels like a victory that we are moving closer to the truth. But when the truth is taking you somewhere you don’t want to go, you also aren’t sure. You aren’t sure you want that win.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“It gets creepy in the Hamptons after Labor Day. Like, I’m talking The Shining creepy.”
Laura Dave
Hello, Sunshine

“It is an amazing thing to be with someone who really sees you.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“It seemed to me that the universe was tricky that way-as soon as you didn’t need something as badly, as soon as you hold onto the hope of it less tightly, you get a second shot at it.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“It’s a terrible thing to know everything about someone long after you want to.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“It’s never about someone else the moment you realize it is up to you to get yourself to a better place. It’s only about figuring out how to get there.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“It’s weird to live somewhere where you can’t see the stars.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“It’s harder to appreciate what you don’t have to look hard to find.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“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.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Maybe that’s what happens when the bottom falls out, you lose the ability to modulate – to make your words make sense to the rest of the world.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“Maybe we are all fools, one way or another, when it comes to seeing the totality of the people who love us – the people we try to love.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“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’t. 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’t learned enough to figure out that this new person probably won’t save them either.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Most of the time a person wants something more than anything else. You can tell because at the end of the day that’s what they’re willing to fight for” -Dan”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Mother-in-laws are the worst. You know, they don’t like you, they make you feel bad about yourself, they have a divorce party the day you meet them and you have to face the fact that they are crazy. Plus, if you aren’t very sure of yourself, you may start feeling like you are going that way too.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“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”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Occur to you that if you weren’t living in fear of other people’s opinions of you, no one would have the power to take anything away?”
Laura Dave
Hello, Sunshine

“Only knows that the important part is to decide to stay. Again and again. And, on the days you can’t, to resist deciding anything else.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“Part of me still wants to hold on to this one last moment – the moment where you still get to believe this is a joke, an error, a big nothing; the moment before you know for sure that something has started that you can no longer stop.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“People always say that things come full circle, but I think that’s not accurate. I think they just come very close. You find yourself almost back where you started, but you’ve moved slightly. Like evidence of the time that has passed, of the things that have happened.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“People don’t break up because someone’s family is a little . . . messy. If that were the case, no one would ever get married.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“People don’t tend to work that way. We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“People get more work done when they don’t talk.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“People screw up, you know. You shouldn’t hold it against them. You shouldn’t expect everyone to know everything you’re thinking about or not getting from them. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. They screw up.” -Bobby” (Laura Dave Quotes)
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“Saying someone’s innocent makes you sound like an idiot. Especially when most people are guilty as fuck.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“She has learned, over time, that the way someone laughs often mirrors who they are. How they are.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“She thinks it has something to do with one of her clearest memories of her mother—the two of them sitting on Maggie’s bed, early one Saturday morning, eating ginger pancakes and drinking unsweetened iced tea. Listening to the radio. She can still call it up whenever she eats the pancakes. Not just the memory. But the feeling, as if it is happening right now.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“She tries to figure out how to say it so he hears her.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“Someone’s affection would give someone else freedom.”
Laura Dave
London is the Best City in America

“Sometimes you don’t know it. What you have been waiting your whole life for. You don’t know until it is happening.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Sometimes your passion takes work and you shouldn’t give up on it just because it isn’t easy. Sometimes, kid, you need to work harder to get to a better place.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“That real love comes over time, once that initial draw you’re talking about takes on a different form. When you get to understand there is something more concrete between you. Something that is worth preserving…”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“That sometimes you find your way to the place that wants you most.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“That’s the thing about a small town, people protect their own. It takes a lot for them to turn on someone they love.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“That’s the brutality of a breakup, isn’t it? The people leaving think they did everything possible, the people left behind think what is possible hasn’t even been tested yet.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“The calm can’t last, not if you’re really living. if you’re living fully, the storms coming to get you.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren’t there anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You’re still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.”
Laura Dave
London is the Best City in America

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made. —Groucho Marx”
Laura Dave
Hello, Sunshine

“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.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“There are parts I wish didn’t exist, parts I can’t look away from now. In one way or another, this is the deal we all sign when we love someone. For better or worse. It’s the deal we have to sign again and again to keep that love. 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.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“There is a moment in every relationship when you see the whole thing. The question is when does the moment come? Is it the first time you see the person and instinctively know that things between you are going to work out, or fail? Or is it a moment toward the end, however you get there, when you realize that there is something behind this persons eyes that you were never able to touch, no matter how hard you tried?”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“There is nothing worse than losing your child. Nothing. Especially when you are someone who lives his life for his family.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“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.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“Thing is, either way we cut it, we shouldn’t test the people we love,” he said. “We do, but it’s shitty and ultimately, regardless of what they did or didn’t do, we’re the ones who feel like we failed.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“This is the painful part. 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.”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“This is the terrible thing about a tragedy. It isn’t with you every minute. You forget it, and then you remember it again. And you see it with a stark quality: This is what is required of you now, just to get along.” (Laura Dave Quotes)
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“This is the thing about good and evil. They aren’t so far apart – and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“This is the thing about good and evil. They aren’t so far apart—and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“This was something we sometimes did on days we got home late—on days we were too tired to get into the big stuff. We each picked one thing from the day to tell each other about. One good thing from our separate lives.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“This wasn’t because he liked me, I was sure. It had more to do with him banking on what we of wedding age had all become witnesses to—how during these wedding weekends, single women, feeling a little lonely, maybe, or just feeling a little too far from being the bride, found themselves loosening their own rules, opting to be more flexible, more quickly.”
Laura Dave
London is the Best City in America

“To figure out how to be brave enough to find the life I wanted. To hold it, once it was found.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“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.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“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.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“We forget all sorts of things that no one helps us remember.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“We have to figure out how to let go, and forgive. This is our job”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“We knew each other so well by this point—knew each other in that honest, unmitigated way that people get to know you who meet you when you’re still young. Before all the rest of it. Before it becomes both easier and harder to know yourself.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“We loved each other in the difficult, unusable way where you took turns doing it, instead of ever managing to do it at the same time.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“We only really remember things for five years. After that, what we remember, what’s actually etched in our brain is our memory of the thing, not the thing itself. And five years after that, what’s left is our memory of the memory.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Weekend ritual to sit on the bench together, drinking our morning coffee.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“What I’m trying to say is that it will be okay between you and Nate. Because you both want that. Because you both want that more than anything. It sounds simple, but I’m learning that the problems start when you want different things”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“When everything gets messy and brutal and complicated, the truth is the first thing to go, isn’t it?”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“When you saw where the truth was, you wanted to get there as quickly as you could, before you lost sight of it again.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“When you’re willing to do the work, it’s amazing what can be saved.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?”
Laura Dave
London is the Best City in America

“Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?”
Laura Dave
The Divorce Party

“Why people travel far from home-far from where they started. There was, of course, the obvious reason: escape. Escape from the monotony of every day. So many of us chasing what we wished our everyday existence could be instead. But there was a less obvious and perhaps more important reason. Somewhere, often right in the middle of a trip, you got to believe this was your everyday life. You got to believe you were never going home again.”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“You can’t finish the things you weren’t supposed to start.”
Laura Dave
London is the Best City in America

“You can’t tell people to trust you. You have to show them that they can.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me

“You have something you want to do. Something you like to do. Something you’re good at. Why don’t we start with that? Why don’t you let that be the entire plan for now?”
Laura Dave
The First Husband

“You have to grow about 800 grapes to get just one bottle of wine. If that isn’t an argument to finish the bottle, I don’t know what is.”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“You have to grow about eight hundred grapes to get just one bottle of wine. If that isn’t an argument to finish the bottle, I don’t know what is. —Anonymous”
Laura Dave
Eight Hundred Grapes

“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.”
Laura Dave
The Last Thing He Told Me