Leaving Everything Behind Quotes & Sayings

Everyone grieves differently. No one handles the loss of a loved one the same. Some put on a brave face for others, keeping everything internal. Others let it all out at once and shatter, only to pick up the pieces just as quickly as they came apart. Still others don't grieve at all, implying they are incapable of emotion.
Then there are the ones like me, where grief is a badge we wear, where it's hard to let go because we don't want to. We probably wouldn't know how even is we wanted to. There's unanswered questions, unresolved feelings. Tere is anger that this person could even conceive of leaving us behind. We are the furious ones, the ones that scream at the injustice and the pain. We are the ones who obsess and slowly lose rational thought, knowing it is happening but unable to find a way to care. We are the ones who drown. — T.J. Klune

Fire is a brief, temporary thing - the very definition of impermanence. It comes suddenly, roaring into life when heat and fuel come together and ignite, and dances hungrily while everything around it blackens and curls. When there is nothing left to consume, it disappears, leaving nothing behind but the ash of its unused fuel - those bits of wood and leaf and paper that were too impure to burn, too unworthy to join the fire in its dance. — Dan Wells

You must learn to wait properly ... By letting go of yourself, leaving yourself and everything yours behind you so decisively that nothing more is left of you but a purposeless tension — Eugen Herrigel

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything. — Jorge Luis Borges

God bless the rain, and the storm clouds that bring it.
God bless the music, and the voices that sing it.
God bless the ones who sing everything wrong.
God bless the creatures who do not belong.
God bless the hearts and the souls who are grieving
For those who have left, and for those who are leaving.
God bless each perishing body and mind,
God bless all creatures remaining behind.
God bless the dreamers whose dreams have awoken.
God bless the lovers whose hearts have been broken.
God bless each soul that is tortured and taunted,
God bless all creatures alone and unwanted. — Dav Pilkey

It's harder to end a war than begin one. Indeed, everything that American troops have done in Iraq
all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering
all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people. We're building a new partnership between our nations. — Barack Obama

Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. — Tim O'Brien

You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. — Tim O'Brien

I never knew how easy it is to escape if you don't mind leaving nearly everything behind. — Beth Revis

I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.
And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.
The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun - curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway - lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.
Alex was right. It was gorgeous - one of the best I've ever seen. — Lauren Oliver

We had no choice. We ran into darkness of the early morning leaving everything behind. — Lissa Price

That's the brutality of a breakup, isn't it? The people leaving think they did everything possible, the people left behind think what is possible hasn't even been tested yet. — Laura Dave

A lot of the stories I was brought up on had to do with extreme actions - leaving everything behind, crossing the trackless wastes, and in those stories the people who stayed behind and had their settled ways - those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California. — Joan Didion

We fly forgotten as a dream, certainly, leaving the forgetful world behind us to trample and mar and misplace everything we have ever cared for. That is just the way of it, and it is remarkable. — Marilynne Robinson

Every so often, we all gaze into the abyss. It's a depressing fact of life that eventually the clock expires; eventually the sand in the hourglass runs out. It's the leaving behind of everything that matters to us that hurts the most. — Ben Shapiro

This is my home, Cape Breton is my home, and I don't know if I really want to leave it as much as I might think and I'm sort of scared to leave it all behind, everything I've lived with, I have so many memories of all the things I've done here and I'm afraid if I leave, I might lose all my memories ... — Rebecca McNutt

I walked away from Lexi, leaving her standing behind the gate. Ren was smart to put the barrier between us. I fought everything in me not to run back to the house and steal her away. Instead, I walked around the corner and punched the wall, brilliant. My hand throbbed along with my heartbeat and the only thing I could do was stuff it in a pile of snow. A couple huddled together and pretended I wasn't there as they passed by - smart people. — S.G. Holster

Mira moved into the light like a sleepwalker, leaving Blue behind in the dust, the unused room, the past.
She thought of the fabled hundred years that cursed girls like her had slept, and how, after that much time, everything would be covered by a thick blanket of dust, including the princess. The intrepid prince would have to trust that something beautiful was hidden underneath. He'd kiss her and the first color to be revealed would be the chapped pink of her lips.
Her eyes went to Freddie, playing his guitar and lit by the sun. She couldn't picture him kissing a girl coated by dust - he was too alive for that.
He was golden. And she ... she was covered with death, with her grief over her parents. She'd tried to replace them with dreams, and she'd drifted through life in a haze, her eyes seeking ghosts instead of the world around her.
She was already asleep.
She had been for a long time. — Sarah Cross

Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same. — NoViolet Bulawayo

He was going to miss everything. But he guessed that was how everybody always felt. Everyone was losing things, leaving things behind, clinging to old memories as they rushed into the future. Everyone was a passenger on a runaway train. — Philip Reeve

When you die, you want to die a beautiful death. But what makes for a beautiful death is not always clear. To die without suffering, to die without causing trouble to others, to die leaving behind a beautiful corpse, to die looking good -- it's not clear what is meant by a beautiful death. Does a beautiful death refer to the way you die or the condition of your corpse after death? This distinction is not clear. And when you start to stretch the image of death to the method of how to dispose of your corpse as befitting your image of death, everything grows completely out of hand. — Shinmon Aoki

There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you. — Damon Galgut

While you might think the choices that leave no regrets behind are the minimal ones and the casual ones and the safe ones, I believe the opposite is true. Regret happens when we are still left with "what if." Regret is the result of leaving a story within you still untold, a song inside of you never sung, a touch unique to your personhood that never was felt by another. When you lay everything on the line because you believe that much that the life you have been given is the utmost calling to be answered, you don't regret it. — Stephen Lovegrove

I'm only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I'll be gone forever - -
the way the door closes
behind me with such solidity,
the way my suitcase
carries everything
I'd need for an eternity
of traveling light.
I've left my hotel number
on your desk, instructions
about the dog and heating dinner. But
like the weather front
they warn is on its way
with its switchblades
of wind and ice,
our lives have minds
of their own. — Linda Pastan

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

What nobody tells you about getting engaged is he asks you and you're delirious for about 2 days and then it tapers. He asks you and you're running around telling grocery clerks and ordering subscriptions to bride magazines and discussing prong settings, and then after 2 days this ebullience passes. And instead of looking ahead you are suddenly struck by everything you are leaving behind. — Suzanne Finnamore

And she could clearly remember how the first time she met him, he was like a sketch paper filled with grey and blue and black, all mixed up together forming a confusing storm, the second time she met him was like red and orange and everything that burned, the third time it was raining and it felt like the storm would never end.
And she felt right now that the storm is ending. When he took his glasses off and she saw the sadness in his eyes, and she could clearly see how the storm is going to leave soon, but yet leaving behind it broken pieces and shattered glasses. — Basma Salem

Success means leaving everything behind and standing persistently towards our aims with great determination. — Rajasaraswathii

I was conscious of that moment of stepping into the woods and leaving everything else behind. That one instant when all the sounds of people, of traffic, of doors opening and closing, were suddenly gone, swallowed up by trees and ferns. It was like a curtain falling on a stage, and I waited for that moment every time. My heart opened just a little bit wider. — Lynn Thomson

That was the thing about water under a bridge. It could get caught up in a bunch of debris, or it could sweep everything away, leaving nothing behind; it all depended on the ferocity of the storm. — Megan Hart

...They eat everything alive. People, dogs, horses. Everything with flesh on it. So many of them crawling. Everywhere. Leaving the bones behind. — Elizabeth Winthrop

It's not TIME that heals everything, it is SLEEP ...
Sleeping is the perfect answer to all doubts and troubles.
Leaving the world of reality behind and disappearing in to a world of make-believe and imaginations, is a solace you get from nothing else ... — Sanhita Baruah

It started when we were little kids.
Free spirits, but already
tormented by our own hands
given to us by our parents.
We got together and wrote on desks
and slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountains
and slipped through whatever
cracks we could find,
minds altered, we didn't falter
in portraving hysterical and
tragic characters in a smog
filled universe.
we loved the dirty city
and the journeys away from it.
We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves,
chase tails round and round in downward spirals,
leaving trail of irretrievable,
vital life juice behind.
Still, the
brothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzz
was impenetrable
and we lived inside it
laughing with no clothes, and
everything experimental 'till
death was upon us.
In our face, mortality. — Anthony Kiedis

For in this worldof ours where everything withers, everything perishes, there is a thing that decays, that crumbles into dust even more completely, leaving behind, still fewer traces of itself, than beauty: namely, grief. — Marcel Proust

As you climbed, leaving the little village paths down below, the noise of the earth, the crickets, the quails and other birds began their morning song, their chant, their rich worship of the day. And as the sun arose you were part of that light and had left behind everything that thought had put together. You completely forgot yourself. The psyche was empty of its struggles and its pains. And as you walked, climbed, there was no sense of separateness, no sense of being even a human being. — Jiddu Krishnamurti