Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

She wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying.

The brain abets the eye; eventually your expectations of a thing supersede the thing itself.

Clay had tenure, and Amanda had the title of director, but they did not have level floors and central air-conditioning. The key to success was having parents who had succeeded.

What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.

“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.

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.

You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life.

Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would.