Home > Author > Rumaan Alam
1 " Just reviewing this list, these to-dos and dones, her pace quickens; she feels lighter, she feels smarter, she feels in control, she feels alive. "
― Rumaan Alam , Rich and Pretty
2 " His manners are old-fashioned, the work of a vigilant mother. "
3 " This body. This body Dan wanted to possess, and together they made a baby, asleep right now in the very next room. She tells herself that he's alive, that he's well, though some instinct in her tells her, every so often, that the baby is dead, that she needs to rush to his side. Either this will pass, or it never will. This is motherhood. "
4 " One of her most reached-for truisms was that some percentage of jobs were indistinguishable from one another, as they all involved the sending of emails assessing the job itself. "
― Rumaan Alam , Leave the World Behind
5 " 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. "
6 " Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would. "
7 " Enjoying a moment is a victory. "
8 " They had asked themselves questions when they decided to have children — do we have the money, do we have the space, do we have what it takes — but they didn’t ask what the world would be when their children grew. "
9 " People weren’t that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage. "
10 " You told yourself there was an end to the worry. You told yourself it was sleeping through the night, then weaning from the breast, then walking then shoelaces then reading then algebra then sex then college admissions then you would be liberated, but this was a lie. Worry was infinite. A parent’s only task was to protect his child. "
11 " You never know when a time is the last time, because if you did you could never go on with life. "
12 " Life was like that; life was about change. "
13 " There was a point, when he was younger, where he’d dreamed of understanding grown-up conversation. Now he could, and realized he’d overestimated it. "
14 " It was like some tacit agreement; everyone had ceded to things just falling apart. That it was common knowledge that things were bad surely meant they were actually worse. "
15 " 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. "
16 " There was no way to explain that the thing about dark is that it’s rare. There’s always some ambient light. There’s always that contrast that helps you understand: This is dark. The pricks of stars, the leak beneath the door, the glow of an appliance, something. Wasn’t its ability to assert itself, and at breakneck speed at that, light’s most remarkable quality? "
17 " She likes the frisson of improvisation. Fun cannot be scheduled. Fun simply occurs. "
18 " Theirs was a failure of imagination, though, two overlapping but private delusions. G. H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful. You didn’t have to scrutinize the curve to know; you didn’t even have to read the papers, because our phones reminded us many times daily precisely how bad things had got. How easy to pretend otherwise. "
19 " Worry was infinite. "
20 " The world was over, so why not dance? "
