Leaving Quotes (page 33)
The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That,...
Penelope Lively
Here I am on the shore of Brittany. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done. I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. I will swim, trample the grass, hung, and smoke especially. I will drink alcohol as strong as boiling metal--just as my dear ancestors did around their fires.
Arthur Rimbaud
So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far. It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.
Leonard Cohen
Philippa’s letter, from an afflicted conscience, was not very much longer. … if I don’t look for him, no one else will. You know I’m sorry. But I couldn’t leave that little thing to wither away by itself Don’t be sad. We’re all going to come back. And you can teach him Two Legs and I Wot a Tree, and save him the top of the milk for his blackberry pie. He’ll never know, if we’re quick, that nobody wanted him.… Which had, Kate considered as she scrubbed off her tears, a ring of unlikely...
Dorothy Dunnett
Today I might lose both of them. I try to imagine a world where both Gale's and Peeta's voices have ceased. Hands stilled. Eyes unblinking. I'm standing over their bodies, having a last look, leaving the room where they lie. But when I open the door to step out into the world, there's only a tremendous void. A pale grey nothingness that is all my future holds.
Suzanne Collins
Jamie felt as though her heart would literally take flight from her crest. Damn her and her mouth. “Nick, I was sort of exaggerating about how nasty I was going to act of the plane. Why can’t we just leave Fleas with Max and get going?”
“She’s lying, Nick,” Max said. “You don’t do things her way and she turns into Satan’s daughter.
Janet Evanovich
Within minutes my 115-mile walk through the desert hills becomes a thing apart, a disjunct reality on the far side of a bottomless abyss, immediately beyond physical recollection.
But it’s all still there in my heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure—they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days to come, like a treasure found and then, voluntarily, surrendered. Returned to the mountains with my blessing. It leaves a golden glowing on the mind.
Edward Abbey