Leaving Us Behind Quotes & Sayings

I wonder whether she was sorry for leaving us behind. — Lauren Oliver

In particular, I wanted to help build a team behind Boris Johnson so that a politician who argued for leaving the European Union could lead us to a better future. — Michael Gove

The abundance that is offered to us by leaving behind the fossil fuel paradigm is very promising for the world and the people of the world. We will have cleaner air, water, and food; we will have more resources to share with our people. There will be more economic freedom because people will be able to harvest their own energy. — Mark Ruffalo

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

Those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe that in fact the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation, we find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job. — Newt Gingrich

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us
that's snatched right out of our hands
even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness. — Haruki Murakami

Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it
unable quite to let each other go. — Kazuo Ishiguro

I see artists bored by light-without-heat, irked at gigantic galleries' pushing out art-as-product, leaving behind the over determined for the undetermined, guided by interior voices and bringing us out of a long tunnel to new blueness. — Jerry Saltz

Humming and singing my new song, I led them up and down the stairs, pressing my fingers against the wall like I was about to push it over; down to the lobby, where I stood in a pot plant; and finally into the alley behind the studio, where I jumped on top of the car that had brought us from the hotel, leaving dents in the roof so the car would remember me. — Maggie Stiefvater

Believe me, I've thought long and hard about leaving things alone. But then there will always be this wall between us." "It's all ugly things behind the wall," I said, not looking at him. "I'm not afraid of what's behind the wall, only the wall itself." But the wall was my exoskeleton. It was what held me up. Sometimes it was the only thing that held me up. — Sherry Thomas

The light was leaving in the west it was blue The children's laughter sang and skipping just like the stones they threw the voices echoed across the way its getting late It was just another night with the sun set and the moon rise not so far behind to give us just enough light to lay down underneath the stars listen to papas translations of the stories across the sky we drew our own constellations — Jack Johnson

I'm not leaving, Kitten. You're going to do this.
My mouth opened as did the door behind us. Stomach dropping, I turned to see Mom standing there in all her fuzzy-bunny pajama glory. Oh, for the love of God. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Most of us made a rather extensive study of heterosexuality before leaving it behind. -Pat Califia — Carol Queen

When the pain of leaving behind what we know outweighs the pain of embracing it, or when the power we face is overwhelming and neither flight nor fight will save us, there may be salvation in sitting still. And if salvation is impossible, then at least before perishing we may gain a clearer vision of where we are. By sitting still I do not mean the paralysis of dread, like that of a rabbit frozen beneath the dive of a hawk. I mean something like reverence, a respectful waiting, a deep attentiveness to forces much greater than our own. — Scott Russell Sanders

we have a Gene-IE to grant us wishes," he said. Darlene brushed past in her white coat. To my surprise, Eliza was at the computer desk behind the lab door and looked up at me. "You took your time," she said with a glint in her green eyes. "Leaving us to do all the work." I had an overwhelming urge to hug her, which I didn't fight. She responded very tightly, then slowly broke away. "What are you doing standing — James Patterson

Yet whatever her enthusiasm for independence, with time Chloe nevertheless began leaving things behind. Not toothbrushes or pairs of shoes, but pieces of herself. It began with language, with Chloe leaving me her way of saying not ever instead of never, and of stressing the be of before, or of saying take care before hanging up the telephone. She in turn acquired use of my perfect and if you really think so. Habits began to leak between us: I acquired Chloe's need for total darkness in the bedroom, she followed my way of folding the newspaper, I took to wandering in circles around the sofa to think a problem through, she acquired a taste carpet. — Alain De Botton

The silhouettes of houses slipped past before I could catch them and remember the people we were leaving behind. In a couple of hours they would wake and find us gone, far away, so as not to remind them of their pain and what our family now meant to this town.
My name is Tom Brennan and this is my story. — J.C. Burke

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

Colors shift like smoke within the branch beneath our feet. Sprites jump from leaf to leaf, leaving sprinklings of glittery dust in the air behind them. Droplets of water are strung like pearls from the silver strands of a spider's web. Bluebottle glow-bugs stick to the leaves and branches, lighting up the night with their blue-green bodies. And high above us, clouds are draped like sashes of color across the sky. Amethyst, azure, jade. — Rachel Morgan

In the hero stories, the call to go on a journey takes the form of a loss, an error, a wound, an unexplainable longing, or a sense of a mission. When any of these happens to us, we are being summoned to make a transition. It will always mean leaving something behind, ... The paradox here is that loss is a path to gain. — David Richo

As the waves of perfume, heliotrope, rose,
Float in the garden when no wind blows,
Come to us, go from us, whence no one knows;
So the old tunes float in my mind,
And go from me leaving no trace behind,
Like fragrance borne on the hush of the wind. — Sara Teasdale

But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget," Ray continued. "Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship
it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good
or we keep trying for the perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible. — Nicole Krauss

The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection of dogmas. Thus we euro-americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification. Evil can come only from us; other people are motivated by sympathy, good will, candor. This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history. — Pascal Bruckner

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

I don't believe we return to haunt or comfort the living or anything, but I think something becomes of us." "But you fear oblivion." "Sure, I fear earthly oblivion. But, I mean, not to sound like my parents, but I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls. The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything." I just shook my head. "What?" he asked. "Your obsession with, like, dying for something or leaving behind some great sign of your heroism or whatever. It's just weird." "Everyone wants to lead an extraordinary life. — John Green

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory - and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making. — Mark Twain

Okay,' he said. He took a breath. 'What would you do, if you could do anything?'
I took a step toward him, closing the space between us. 'This,' I said. And then I kissed him.
Kissed him. There, in the middle of the street, as the world went on around us. Behind me, I knew Jason was still waiting for an explanation, my sister was still lecturing, and that angel still had her eyes skyward, waiting to fly. As for me, I was just trying to get it right, whatever that meant. But now I finally felt I was on my way. Everyone had a forever, but given a choice, this would be mine. The one that began in this moment, with Wes, in a kiss that took my breath away, then gave it back- leaving me astounded, amazed, and most of all, alive. — Sarah Dessen

The Buddhist ideal of awakening implies that we can sever our links with our evolutionary past. We can raise ourselves from the sleep in which other animals pass their lives. Our illusions dissolved, we need no longer suffer. This is only another doctrine of salvation, subtler than that of the Christians, but no different from Christianity in its goal of leaving our animal inheritance behind.
But the idea that we can rid ourselves of animal illusion is the greatest illusion of all. meditation may give us a fresher view of things but cannot uncover them as they are in themselves. — John Gray

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

The Logos came down out of love for us. Let us not keep Him down permanently, but let us go up with Him to the Father, leaving the earth and earthly things behind, lest He say to us what He said to the Jews because of their stubbornness: 'I go where you cannot come (Jn. 8:21). — Maximus The Confessor

From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone. — Haruki Murakami

The past is but an untraceable footfall
It appears in intervals and pushes us back in time,
In those moments of grief and then suddenly vanishes.
It's often dark and ruthless.
It baffles our thoughts and seizes our peace of mind.
By making us recollect our failures, our buried expectations
And our shattered dreams
It only gives way to fleeting tears, leaving us with fruitless guilt.
It wrecks our present and ruins our future
And thus should be left where it is meant to be
It should be left behind ... — Chirag Tulsiani

All of us need to leave things behind in order to follow God. For some of us, it is addictive patterns of behavior, for others an overweening emphasis on our own success, for others the adulation of the crowd. It helps sometimes to look not just at what we're leaving behind and what God promises us, but also at what God has shown us already. Just look at all those fish. — James Martin

There. You see? You're just figuring it out now, but I discovered a long time ago that the smarter you are, the more tempting it is to just let people imagine you. We move through each other's lives like ghosts, leaving behind haunting memories of people who never existed. The popular jock. The mysterious new girl. But we're the ones who choose, in the end, how people see us. And I'd rather be misremembered. Please, Ezra, misremember me. — Robyn Schneider

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind. — Anna Brownell Jameson

High Pasture
Come up
come up: in the dim vale below
The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
Night is not, autumn is not
but the flow
Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries
In waxing tides of unimagined glow.
And to that height illumined of the mind
he calls us still by the familiar way,
Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay
Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
How on the heights is day and still more day. — Edith Wharton

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. — Pascal Mercier

We are human precisely insofar as we always intend a singularity across the thickness of our lives, insofar as we are grouped around this unique interior where there is no one, which is latent, veiled, and escapes from us always leaving behind in our hands truth which are like traces of its absence. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

All of us have read of what occured during that interval. The tale is in every Englishman's mouth; and you and I, who were children when the great battle was won and lost, are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action. Its rememberance rankles still in the bosoms of millions of the countrymen of those brave men who lost the day. They pant for an opportunity of revenging that humiliation; and if a contest, ending in a victory on their part, should ensue, elating them in their turn, and leaving its cursed legacy of hatred and rage behind to us, there is no end to the so-called glory and shame, and to the alterations of successful and unsuccessful murder, in which two high-spirited nations might engage. Centuries hence, we Frenchmen and Englishmen might be boasting and killing each other still, carrying out bravely the Devil's code of honor. — William Makepeace Thackeray

Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we're in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we're leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don't remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of the aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened. — Don DeLillo

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

There is a sense of danger in leaving what you know, even if what you know isn't much. These mill towns with their narrow lanes and often narrow minds were all I really knew and I feared that if I left it behind, I would lose it and not find anything to replace it. The other reason I didn't want to go was because I wanted to be the kind of person who stays, who builds a stable and predictable life. But I wasn't one of the people, nor would I ever be.
I had a vision for my life. It wasn't clear, but it was beautiful and involved leaving my history and my poverty behind me. I wasn't happy about who I was or where I was, but I didn't worry about it. It didn't define me. We're always in the making. God always has us on his anvil, melting, bending and shaping us for another purpose.
It was time to change, to find a new purpose. — John William Tuohy

In the end it was Shadowhunting they had bonded over - a shared
love of sharp-edged weapons, gleaming seraph blades, the painful
pleasure of burning Marks, the thought-numbing swiftness of battle.
When Alec had wanted to go out hunting alone with Jace, leaving Izzy
behind, Jace had spoken up for her: "We need her with us; she's the
best there is. Aside from me, of course."
She had loved him just for that. — Cassandra Clare

Yet part of me also thinks the whole idea makes perfect sense. The three of us, leaving our differences behind, stepping on the plane together, sitting side by side, lifting off, moving West to reach the East. — Amy Tan

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

At the last moment, Kellan swerved around him, quickly leaving the zombie behind.
"Why didn't you just hit him?" Jayden asked, turning to look behind us as we sped away. I did, too. The zombie spun around as he immediately started to follow us.
"I didn't want to mess up my paint job," Kellan sarcastically replied as he turned on the street that would lead us to the store. "Plus, I just washed it. — Rose Wynters

Documentary is a little like horror movies, putting a face on fear and transforming threat into fantasy, into imagery. One can handle imagery by leaving it behind. (It is them, not us.) — Martha Rosler

The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. — Tahereh Mafi

My union with you, my love, was only of the wayside; it was well enough so long as we followed the same road; it will only hamper us if we try to preserve it further. We are now leaving its bonds behind. We are started on our journey beyond, and it will be enough if we can throw each other a glance, or feel the touch of each other's hands in passing. After that? After that there is the larger world-path, the endless current of universal life. — Rabindranath Tagore

All my life I have been trained by that siren. Before I could walk I knew the siren meant death. It meant somehow the fences had been breached and the Unconsecrated were shuffling among us. It meant grab weapons, move to the platforms and pull up the ladders - even if it necessitated leaving the living behind.
Growing up, my mother used to tell me about how in the beginning, when her own great-great-great-grandmother was a child, that siren would wail almost constantly as the village was bombarded with the Unconsecrated. But then the fences has been fortified, the Guardians had formed and time had passed with the Unconsecrated dwindling to the point that I couldn't remember a time in the past few years when that siren had wailed and it had not been a drill. I know that in my life there have been breaches but I also know that I am very good at blocking out the memories that serve me no purpose. I can fear the Unconsecrated well enough without them. — Carrie Ryan

Mouth to continue, Haymitch plummets off the stage and knocks himself unconscious. He's disgusting, but I'm grateful. With every camera gleefully trained on him, I have just enough time to release the small, choked sound in my throat and compose myself. I put my hands behind my back and stare into the distance. I can see the hills I climbed this morning with Gale. For a moment, I yearn for something ... the idea of us leaving the district ... making our way in the woods ... but I know I was right about not running off. Because who else would have volunteered for Prim? Haymitch is whisked away on a stretcher, and Effie Trinket is trying to get the ball rolling again. What an — Suzanne Collins

I knew it was a terrible idea. We were supposed to be leaving our past behind us, not fully embracing it. But she was a part of my past that I wanted to hold onto. She was my only reminder of Tommy, my only remaining connection. I couldn't let that die, not yet. — Nicole Sobon

It can be difficult to leave a long-term relationship, even when our inner-wisdom tells us it's time to let go. At this point, we can choose let go and endure the intense pain of leaving behind the familiar to make way for a new chapter in our life. Or we can stay and suffer a low-grade pain that slowly eats away at our heart and soul, like an emotional cancer. Until we wake up, one day and realize, we are buried so deep in the dysfunction of the relationship that we scarcely remember who we were and what we wanted and needed to be. — Jaeda DeWalt

Death, of course, like chastity, admits of no degree; a man is dead or not dead, and a man is just as dead by one means as by another; but it is infinitely more horrible and revolting to see a man shattered and eviscerated, than to see him shot. And one sees such things; and one suffers vicariously, with the inalienable sympathy of man for man. One forgets quickly. The mind is averted as well as the eyes. It reassures itself after that first despairing cry: "It is I!"
"No, it is not I. I shall not be like that."
And one moves on, leaving the mauled and bloody thing behind: gambling, in fact, on that implicit assurance each one of us has of his own immortality. One forgets, but he will remember again later, if only in his sleep. — Frederic Manning