Goodbye Without Leaving Quotes

“To be effortlessly yourself is a blessing, an ambrosia. It is like a few tiny little puffs of opium which lift you ever so slightly off the hard surface of the world.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“How lucky, I thought, were people who had known from earliest childhood what they wanted to do. All the children in my grammar school, who said they wanted to be doctors, had grown up to become doctors. This was also the case apparently with firemen, veterinarians, songwriters, and race car drivers.

I had opted for a kind of pure experience, which, as Doo-Wah had pointed out, is not usually something you get paid for. I did not want to write a book about it. I did not want to write so much as an article. I wanted to be left alone with my experience and go on to the next thing, whatever that was.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Gertje was right. To be an American was to be blessed with a kind of idiotic but very useful innocence.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“These days any planned thing looked good to me. What heaven to have your work cut out for you, to be part of the Big Picture -- a picture you did not have to paint yourself.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“We listened to late-night jazz on the radio and went to jazz clubs, thick with smoke, and drank warm beer. In the daytime I lay on my own bed and read books. I kept a stack by my bed and read them off one by one till they dwindled like a pile of pancakes.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Out on the street I felt lost wandering around without my child. I felt I ought to wear a pin that said: I have a child in school at the moment.”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving

“Yes, there was a trick to it. You inherited your life, or you invented it. You figured out what you wanted life to be and then somehow or other you made it that way. Then, miracle of miracles, you liked it!”
― Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving