What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us Quotes

“Winds shake the leaves and for a moment I smell smoke. I concentrate on the scent, but it vanishes into the aroma of rain and tree bark, the way one life can collapse into another and different people can stir within the same body, like bats thrashing inside a secret hollow.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“I've lost the desire to hold onto that last physical artifact of the life I once had, as though I was buried and re-emerged as a person who doesn't believe in anything except the way existence rages on, furiously unconscious of when one life ends and another begins.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“I was afraid of so many things, I had come to realize during my traveling year. My mother seemed to have an immunity to fear, the way she hurled herself into foreign lands and the arms of men, while I was always entangled in ideas about penalties and peril.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“Whenever I had confessed my worries, she told me that if you can keep brushing against death, little by little, fear will become a memory and you'll be able to face anything.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“What did the woman tell you?" she asked. "What did she say when she took my hand?"

"That she could see everything inside you," he said. "And then she told me what was there."

Juliana didn't press any further. She wasn't at all sure she wanted to know what was inside of her.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“What do you think Frederick is trying to say with his pictures?"

"That the world is too much for him." They turned onto a dirt road. White dust rose around the car. "Children say it all the time in different ways. The privilege is lost with age.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“After all, the media was flooded with stories about people suffering from post-traumatic stress; his behavior had seemed understandable. It wasn't until the Paris riots that she realized how much he'd changed, as though some dark seed buried inside him had found the ideal conditions for growth. And after he left, she was forced to recognize how she'd changed as well, her determined cheerfulness and willful ignorance, her ability to read the newspaper and then push the unpleasantness from her mind (how typical, how bourgeoisie, how very American, she thought now), as though the world wasn't shifting very much at all, as though everything wasn't disintegrating beneath them.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“It wasn't that she wanted so badly to remain in Paris; more than anything, she was incapable of deciding, of striking in a different, unknown direction, and was frustrated by her inability to release herself from her life as easily as her husband had, a top spiraling across a flat surface.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“I wanted to tell her that she was right in saying we weren't the first to suffer, but sometimes it felt like we were the only people out there with losses so raw and gaping, and that we could both use a little understanding. I didn't say any of this.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“I stand behind him and rest a hand on his shoulder. He lets me do what I know best: acquiesce, accommodate, allow my desires to melt like wax around the emergency of another life.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“It's not love. Or at least not what I thought love would feel like. It hurts to be near him and it hurts to be away.”
― Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us