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“But they didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew.” (Leave the World Behind Quotes)
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Enjoying a moment is a victory.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“He hoped the night would grow cold. He wanted to stand outside and shiver, then sink into the hot tub and look at the black limbs of the trees.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“He kissed the worn cotton on Rose’s shoulder and regretted that he did not believe in prayer.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“He retrieved his cigarettes from the glove box, wincing at the gravel. He sat on the front lawn in the shade of a tree and smoked. He should feel bad about this, but tobacco was the foundation of the nation. Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“If they didn’t know how it would end, with night, with more terrible noise from the top of Olympus, with bombs, with disease, with blood, with happiness, with deer or something else watching them from the darkened woods—well, wasn’t that true of every day?”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“It was like some tacit agreement; everyone had ceded to things just falling apart. That it was common knowledge that things were bad surely meant they were actually worse.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“It’s the right thing to do.” Clay knew this would work; his wife felt it important, not to do the moral thing, necessarily, but to be the kind of person who would. Morality was vanity, in the end.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Just where you were, in the end. It was just”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Life was like that; life was about change.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Of course they’d never heard a noise like that before. You didn’t hear such a noise; you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it. You could fairly say that their lives could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“One of her most reached-for truisms was that some percentage of jobs were indistinguishable from one another, as they all involved the sending of emails assessing the job itself.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Rose would have loved the flamingos. Maybe they should feel only awe at life’s mysteries, as children did.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos. There was only a collective faith in order.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“She could have got into that bed and read a book. She might even have dozed in that indolent way you do when you’re in a vacation home—not for need of rest but because you can.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“The building lacked a thirteenth floor because that was terrible luck. Simply pretending it wasn’t there was better.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Theirs was a failure of imagination, though, two overlapping but private delusions. G. H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful. You didn’t have to scrutinize the curve to know; you didn’t even have to read the papers, because our phones reminded us many times daily precisely how bad things had got. How easy to pretend otherwise.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“There was a point, when he was younger, where he’d dreamed of understanding grown-up conversation. Now he could, and realized he’d overestimated it.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“There was no way to explain that the thing about dark is that it’s rare. There’s always some ambient light. There’s always that contrast that helps you understand: This is dark. The pricks of stars, the leak beneath the door, the glow of an appliance, something. Wasn’t its ability to assert itself, and at breakneck speed at that, light’s most remarkable quality?”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“They had asked themselves questions when they decided to have children — do we have the money, do we have the space, do we have what it takes — but they didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“To enjoyment. To the enjoyment of vacations. To the enjoyment of any moment in life, I guess. Enjoying a moment is a victory. I think we need to hold on to those.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“Worry was infinite. A parent’s only task was to protect his child.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
“You told yourself there was an end to the worry. You told yourself it was sleeping through the night, then weaning from the breast, then walking then shoelaces then reading then algebra then sex then college admissions then you would be liberated, but this was a lie.”
Rumaan Alam
Leave the World Behind
