Laura Dave · 256 pages
Rating: (2.4K votes)
“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”
“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.”
“You can't finish the things you weren't supposed to start.”
“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.”
“Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?”
“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."
"What's that?"
"Waiting.”
“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.”
“Someone's affection would give someone else freedom.”
“If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you got there? Didn’t it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?”
“Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable.”
“I just think people forget what it feels like to really be in love, you know? Like when that’s the only thing in the world that matters. I just don’t want to decide it’s not that important.”
“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.”
“You can’t finish the things you weren’t supposed to start.”
“newspaper at that very table, and was racing”
“When we want to let go of a situation no matter what it is we must be able to “bless” it. When you bless something you sanction it giving it your approval and endorsement freeing it to go forward with your cooperation and support.”
“We've got to make change our national pastime and hold protests more regularly than weekend parties.”
“Men never had to deal with this, Faith thought. Men didn’t hide in bathrooms and wrestle microfiber and pantyhose. Totally not fair. Men had it easy. Did men get bikini waxed and wear uncomfortable underwear? No, they did not. Faith would bet her life that a man had invented thongs. Men sucked.”
“Usually, a Page 23 vision will begin when you see God dropping hints, not when you see him shooting stars in your direction. And your vision will probably flow from something you're already doing-relationships you've already established, priorities you're already passionate about.
The kind of vision that makes you bold enough to ask God for the impossible can come from many sources. It can materialize in a million ways. And it will mature over time, not in the blink of an eye.”
“During any prolonged activity one tends to forget original intentions. But I believe that, when making a start on A Month in the Country, my idea was to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree. And, to establish the right tone of voice to tell such a story, I wanted its narrator to look back regretfully across forty or fifty years but, recalling a time irrecoverably lost, still feel a tug at the heart.
And I wanted it to ring true. So I set its background up in the North Riding, on the Vale of Mowbray, where my folks had lived for many generations and where, in the plow-horse and candle-to-bed age, I grew up in a household like that of the Ellerbeck family.
Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one's ends. The visit to the dying girl, a first sermon, the Sunday-school treat, a day in a harvest field and much more happened between the Pennine Moors and the Yorkshire Wolds. But the church in the fields is in Northamptonshire, its churchyard in Norfolk, its vicarage London. All's grist that comes to the mill.
Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past.”
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