Leaving Quotes

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“There ain't no way you can hold onto something that wants to go, you understand? You can only love what you got while you got it.”
― Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie

“Don’t leave me,” he whispers.
“Oh, for crying out loud—no! I am not going to go!” I shout and it’s cathartic. There, I’ve said it. I am not leaving.
“Really?” His eyes widen.
“What can I do to make you understand I will not run? What can I say?”
He gazes at me, revealing his fear and anguish again. He swallows. “There is one thing you can do.”
“What?” I snap.
“Marry me,” he whispers.”
― E.L. James, Fifty Shades Darker

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“And the danger is that in this move toward new horizons and far directions, that I may lose what I have now, and not find anything except loneliness.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Well, here at last, dear friends, on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“I make it easier for people to leave by making them hate me a little.”
― Cecelia Ahern, The Book of Tomorrow

“I hated myself for going, why couldn't I be the kind of person who stays?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I was always holding onto people, and they were always leaving.”
― Lili St. Crow, Jealousy

“Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering, because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving. When the child leaves home, when the husband or wife leaves for a long period of time or for good, when the beloved friend departs to another country or dies … the pain of the leaving can tear us apart.
Still, if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear, life stronger than death, hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.”
― Henri Nouwen

“Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.”
― Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road

“Leave something for someone but dont leave someone for something.”
― Enid Blyton, Five on a Hike Together

“We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everyhwere.”
― Tim McGraw

“I give you this to take with you:
Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can
begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.”
― Judith Minty, Letters to My Daughters

“I'm guilty of giving people more chances than they deserve but when I'm done, I'm done.”
― Turcois Ominek

“There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

“And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.”
― Robyn Schneider, The Beginning of Everything

“You get use to someone—start to like them, even—and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves.”
― Rachel Ward, Numbers

“Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave.”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“They were involved in that awkward procedure of getting to unknow each other.”
― John Irving, The World According to Garp

“It's not that I want you to go, it's just that I don't want you to stay." - China Sorrows -”
― Derek Landy, Mortal Coil

“...and that, in the end, the most interesting people always leave.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it--unable quite to let each other go.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“It doesn’t matter how many times you leave, it will always hurt to come back and remember what you once had and who you once were. Then it will hurt just as much to leave again, and so it goes over and over again.
Once you’ve started to leave, you will run your whole life.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion