The Man Who Left Quotes

“The temporary father, the pretend father, was out of my life, taking my mother with him. I’d looked forward to leaving for so long, and now I felt robbed of the statement I’d hoped to make even though the end result was the same. It was an anticlimax to years of misery. To be released with a shrug. I didn’t think it was possible for my mother to raise a child from birth to eighteen years of age, and once I was gone it was easier for her to wash her hands of the responsibility. Easier for her to forget I existed. Most of the time. She’d done so with my older brother, and now she’d let me go, and she would probably do the same with Jude. The freedom was almost too much. I was like some wild bird that had been kept in a cage, then finally released. I flew and flew, and”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left

“Time didn’t heal all wounds. I think time tricked people into thinking they were okay.”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left

“Leave your wife and children, never have contact with them again, and I will give you a life of luxury. He sold his soul. And he’d done it with both eyes open.”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left

“I’ve come to realize that being around someone with Alzheimer’s is like being around someone who’s really, really wasted. And like someone who’s had way too much too drink, his mood and attention swings from one subject and emotion to another. Now he pauses, spots something”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left

“He and I have come full circle, except that now he’s the child and I’m the adult. This time, he’s begging me to stay and I’ll soon be the one walking out the door. The cruelty of my next thought shames me: You reap what you sow.”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left

“Maybe the life he shared with my mother is now so vivid because it was his only real life. The life he shared with Eve was no more real than the life he has now. He’d become a part of it, fallen easily into a role because he wanted to experience a world he’d never known. But it hadn’t been real, not down-to-earth real in the way his first marriage, his first and possibly only love, had been. He gave up love for material wealth. It’s an old plot of many a morality tale, with a familiar ending: powerful, tragic, sad.”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left

“A story about the burdens of remembering and the costs of forgetting,”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left

“But the decay was there, deep and bitter. There was no getting rid of it. She would never be happy again. There might be moments. Small rewards that brought pleasure, but true happiness seemed forever beyond her grasp. And maybe deep down she knew it.”
― Theresa Weir, The Man Who Left