Leave The World Behind Quotes
"Kids were always needing a Band-Aid, pink skin splitting like summer fruit."
"An old saw, but on your deathbed would you remember the night you took the clients to that old steakhouse on Thirty-Sixth Street and asked after their wives, or bobbing about in the pool with your kids, dark lashes beaded with chlorinated water?"
"The gravel made its gravelly sound under Clay’s leather driving shoes."
"The actual rich lived in some other realm, like Narnia."
"Everything was so green it was frankly a little crazy."
"The world was vast but also small and governed by logic."
"The brain abets the eye; eventually your expectations of a thing supersede the thing itself."
"What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you."
"Vacation was for being returned to your body."
"He didn’t mind it. Maybe he liked it. Maybe it made him feel necessary."
"He was never without breath mints or chewing gum."
"Amanda knew that she looked like the sort of woman she was."
"He thought the description comforting, the play-by-play like being read a bedtime story."
"She felt alive and if not sexy, then sexual; the promise mattered more than the transaction."
"The occasional vinyasa class had made her more attentive to her bones."
"The house was too far from the world to offer cellular service, but there was WiFi."
"Pursued by wolves? I’ll make a bridge of my body so you can cross that ravine."
"The key to success was having parents who had succeeded."
"A blackout could be something. It could be a symptom of something bigger."
"The emergency is that New York City is without power. But we still have it."
"It would tell us more if there were more to tell."
"The world was not as fearful as people thought."
"You recount the disasters to demonstrate your fidelity."
"You found yourself holding your grandbabies—twins!—and not saying anything about the fact that they had two moms."
"It just happened. You found yourself holding your grandbabies—twins!—and not saying anything about the fact that they had two moms."
"G. H. flicked on lights, forgetting to pause in gratitude that they still worked."
"You’d do what he said, and maybe in your worst moments you’d worry that Danny was laughing at you."
"She murmured something to show she heard him."
"The funny news on the radio—a band of raccoons broke into a substation in Delaware and knocked out power all over the East Coast."
"Sometimes distance showed a thing most clearly."
"She didn’t want the people upstairs to see her in these cheap clothes."
"G. H. understood electricity as a commodity."
"When you’re the younger child, you learn to fend for yourself."
"Sometimes you had to lie, to be a mother or maybe just a person."
"Ruth woke with lucid eyes and sudden memory."
"Rose felt the change in the day, even if no one else did."
"The prickle on the skin felt like punishment. The sweat felt like virtue."
"We’re just a bunch of adults who don’t know anything about birds."
"We need a plan. We need to know what we’re going to do."
"Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would."
"Fate was collective but the rest of it was always individual."
"You demanded answers, but the universe refused."
"Trees were generous and careful, and maybe that would be their salvation."
"If they didn’t know how it would end... wasn’t that true of every day?"
"All that meant anything was this—people, in the same place, together."
"It took unimaginable courage to kill your children. Few people could manage it."
"The universe didn't care. But maybe it did; maybe it was math."