The Leftovers

Laurie Garvey hadn't been raised to believe in the Rapture.

It was exhilarating to melt into the crowd like that, to feel his identity dissolving into something bigger and more powerful.

— Tom Perrotta, amazon.com

Crowd Crowd Mentality The Power of Crowds

The Rapture is obviously a cataclysmic event. But I started realizing it was a metaphor for getting older, for mortality, and living with mortality. It’s really powerful. We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.

— Tom Perrotta, amazon.com

Rapture Now End of the World Death Loss

For now, though, he'd just have to add her name to the list of people he cared about who'd moved on. It was getting to be a long list, and it contained some pretty important names. In time, he thought, Aimee would probably seem like a footnote, but just now her absence felt bigger than that, like ma…

— Tom Perrotta, amazon.com

Absence Let Go Letting Go Memory Rapture

Laurie couldn't sleep. It was her third night at the Outpost, and the transition wasn't going as smoothly as she'd hoped. Part of it was the strangeness, after twenty-three years of marriage and nine months of communal living, of once again having a room of her own. She just wasn't accustomed to sol…

— Tom Perrotta, amazon.com

Leaving Solitude

A good girlfriend is a good listener, she reminded herself. But she was just pretending, and she knew it. In her former life, Doug used to sit across this very table and try her patience in a similar way, with long-winded soliloquies about whatever deal he happened to be working on at the moment, fi…

— Tom Perrotta, amazon.com

Idle Talk Listening Talk Talk

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