Leaving Quotes

“Being a mother is paying it forward, sending that energy and feeling to someone who needed it at first to survive, but who, the older she becomes, needs you less. The older you become, the more irrelevant you are. Chapter”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“His absence is the largest thing in her life; she has to live around it.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“children take no responsibility for their limbs; it’s like dressing a noodle.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“You were not in charge of your body. Your body was in charge of you.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The justification for leaving a marriage was that you were increasing the sum of happiness in the world. You were ending your own unhappiness, and your spouse’s (if you weren’t happy, your spouse couldn’t really be happy, either), and he or she would find real happiness elsewhere. The children had only known an unhappy marriage. Now they would learn what happy parents are like, and they would become happier, and able to create happy marriages themselves. But actually all this is false and self-serving. The only person whose happiness is increased is the departing spouse. There are no moral grounds for leaving a marriage. You are breaking your vow and causing pain to others. It is selfish, cruel, and dishonorable. How could he have lived with that?”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The dog belongs to a small devotional cult that is entirely dedicated to Sarah. The dog is the only member.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“In Europe they put community first; now in America it was the self. Your own happiness should be paramount. Honor was not considered.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“But do we want to do more dead white males?” Nancy Wilson asks. She’s Sarah’s friend. “Dead white Anglo-Saxon males?” “They did do a lot of things well. We can’t just exclude them all now that we’re feminists,” says Shirley.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The older you become, the more irrelevant you are.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“But then I thought of the kids, and Jeff. And I held on.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“As it turns out, it has become a choice between you and them. I can’t lose them. I can’t lose my daughter.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“How’s the baby?” Sarah has braced herself to ask, though she can hardly bear to think of the child who has dealt this blow to her daughter. She can’t bring herself to say his name.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“When that time comes, will your child set you on the ice floe, or bring you in beside her hearth?”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“She imagines tantrums and boredom, doleful requests for their mother. But it would be lovely,”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Sarah, leaning over the contorted face, the whine drilling into her brain, thinks it’s a miracle that more children are not abused.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Who would he be without his daughter?”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Kat is still not speaking to him. Warren has left many messages.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“You mean I’d move to another place, down here?” “So my daughter would feel it was hers.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Living with Bella is like having a familiar, a small unpredictable spirit who knows you intimately, who is deeply involved in your life in ways you don’t quite understand, who feels she shares your soul, and who is always, always present.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“stands and puts on his shirt. His chest is still damp from shaving,”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Bella.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The thing about absence is that it is always there.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Should you lie to children, to comfort them? What if you promise them that everything would be all right and then it isn’t?”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The wedding is her apotheosis as a mother, her value to the world.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“A wedding is a microcosm of society,”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“Each one a stitch in the long seam of connection. He”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“The existence of the family depends on his reliability. His integrity.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“bad-mother loop, sometimes silent, sometimes loud and insistent.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“birth was like being run over by a truck, that you had no control, that your body was invaded and then used by foreign forces.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving

“though a spotlight has turned on inside his brain.”
― Roxana Robinson, Leaving