The Last Thing He Told Me Quotes

“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. Because”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“elusive way that you either had with someone or you could never quite find—that pervasive shorthand in which a look could tell us what the other person needed: Time to leave the party; Time to reach for me; Time to give me room to breathe. It was a little bit of all of that and something far bigger than all of that. 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. That’s what he was to me. That’s who he was.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

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

“When the world goes quiet again, it will take everything I am not to allow the grief of his loss to level me.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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.

[Hannah Hall]”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“A defense attorney, at least a good defense attorney, never tries to convince anyone of anything. We do the opposite. We remind everyone you can’t know anything for sure.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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, The Last Thing He Told Me

“He raised a glass to them and said, wherever they were, he was grateful to them for not being what I needed, so he got to be the one sitting across from me.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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, The Last Thing He Told Me

“How do you explain it when you find in someone what you’ve been waiting for”
― 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

“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

“We always have a choice. That’s what Grady said too. What does that even mean? That there is a right thing to do and there is a wrong thing to do. Simple. Judgmental. And if you are the person someone is asking that question about, you have chosen wrong—as if the world is divided between the people who have never made a big mistake. And the people who have.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Rotten wood cannot be carved. —Confucius”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“When she was a little girl, when we first got to Sausalito, she was scared to walk down the docks. I think it was because the day after we moved in, Mrs. Hahn slipped and fell and Bailey saw her almost go down, almost land in the water.” “That’s terrible!” I say. “Yeah, well, for those first couple of months, she would make me hold her hand the whole way down the docks. From our front door, all the way to the parking lot. And she’d ask as we went, Daddy, you’re going to keep me safe, right? Daddy, you’re not going to let me fall? It took us like six and a half hours to get from the front door to the car.” I laughed. “It drove me crazy. The hundredth time I had to do it, I actually think I went a little crazy.” He paused. “And you know the only thing worse than that? The day she stopped.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“It leaves you in the same strange place, trying to figure out how to navigate the world without the most important person watching.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“another small reminder how lucky I was to love him.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“But I’m left sitting here, without him, anyway. Doesn’t that make me as ridiculous as my mother is? Doesn’t it make me the same as her? Both of us putting our faith in someone else above everything else—calling it love. What good is love, if this is where it leads you?”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“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

“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

“He never understood that I wasn't scared of someone leaving me. I was scared the wrong person would stay.”
― 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.” Bailey tilts her head. “Still waiting on the English there, Professor,” she says. “It basically means, we don’t know shit about anything,” he says.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“Time to leave the party; Time to reach for me; Time to give me room to breathe.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“As she reads, I listen to her”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“(let’s go said he
not too far said she
what’s too far said he
where you are said she)”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy. —Albert Einstein”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me

“We have our opinion and we filter information into a paradigm that supports it.” “Not a big believer that people can change their minds?” I say. “Does that surprise you?” “Not usually, but you’re a lawyer,” I say. “Isn’t convincing people a large part of the job?” He smiles. “I think that you’re confusing me with a prosecutor,” he says. “A defense attorney, at least a good defense attorney, never tries to convince anyone of anything. We do the opposite. We remind everyone you can’t know anything for sure.”
― 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.”
― 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

“My grandfather used to say that most people don’t want to hear the thing that will make it work better,” I said. “They want to hear what will make it easier.”
― Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me