The World to Come Quotes

“I believe that when people die, they go to the same place as all the people who haven’t yet been born. That’s why it’s called the world to come, because that’s where they make the new souls for the future. And the reward when good people die” – her mother paused, swallowed, paused again – “the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven’t been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have – they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it’s up to the new ones, once they’re born, what they’ll use and what they won’t, but that’s what everyone who dies is doing, I think. They get to decide what kind of people the new ones might be able to become.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Children are often envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more than children do. Most adults wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Hair in darkness doesn’t feel the way it does in light. In light, you can touch a person’s hair and not feel it at all - you might think you are feeling it, but really you are seeing its color, seeing its shape, seeing the light and the shadows intertwined between the hair and your own hands. But in darkness, her hair poured across his palms like molten music between his fingers. Skin in darkness is different, too. In light, you don’t notice skin, distracted as you are by eyes watching you, eyes you are afraid to trust, eyes that could be waiting for your shame. But in pure darkness, her skin was warm and trembling and alive - secret whorled passageways of ears, soft fingertips tracing circles on his neck, the living heartbeat-shudders of falling-closed eyelids, cheeks erupting into lips and giving way to his tongue. And in light you don’t think of how warm a person is, of how a person can enfold you, enclose you amid arms and clothes and ribs in pure primeval underground darkness, the heat between you glowing like an ember that you are afraid to put out.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Time itself is created through deeds of true kindness.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“His dreams contained no stories at all, but only the hard stones of thoughts: the unimaginably unlikely coincidence of being alive at the same time as the love of your life, the frequency with which a person was expected to bear the body and the burden of someone else, the idiocy of thinking that kindness can protect the person who is kind, and worst of all, the bottomless pit of truth that he had suddenly, sickeningly seen: that the world to come was not an afterlife at all, but simply this world, to come- the future world, your own future, that you were creating for yourself with every choice you made in it.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“...she smiled - and time was created.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“There is a moment that has happened over and over again, in every place children have ever slept, on every dark night for the past ten thousand years, that almost everyone who was once a child will forever remember. It happens when you are being tucked into bed, on a dark and frightened night when the sounds of the nighttime outside are drowned out only by the far more frightening sounds in your head. You have already gone to bed, have tried to go to bed, but because of whatever sounds you hear in your head you have failed to go to bed, and someone much older than you, someone so old that you cannot even imagine yourself becoming that old, has come to sit beside you and make sure you fall asleep. But the moment that everyone who was once a child will remember is not the story the unfathomably old person tells you, or the lullaby he sings for you, but rather the moment right after the story or song has ended. You are lying there with your eyes closed, not sleeping just yet but noticing that the sounds inside your head seem to have vanished, and you know, through closed eyes, that the person beside you thinks that you are asleep and is simply watching you. In that fraction of an instant between when that person stops singing and when that person decides to rise from the bed and disappear -- a tiny rehearsal, though you do not know it yet, of what will eventually happen for good -- time holds still, and you can feel, through closed eyes, how that person, watching your still, small face in the darkness, has suddenly realized that you are the reason his life matters. And Sara would give her right leg and her left just to live through that moment one more time.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris’s, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby’s nose—here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)—and whispers to the child: Shh—don’t tell. And then the baby forgets. “Why does he have to forget?” Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn’t want to know, not really. But his mother’s back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, disappear. She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. “So that for the rest of his life,” she said, “he will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he’s forgotten.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Do you think I'm deaf?" the deaf beggar asked. "I'm not deaf at all. It's just that it isn't worth hearing a whole world full of people complaining about what they lack." He told the story of a wealthy country where people believed they were living 'the good life.' The country had a garden of riches, of so many sights and smells and sounds that the people in the country literally lost their senses, spoiled by everything they had already seen and heard and smelled and tasted and touched, until the beggar taught them how to use their senses again.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Daniel Ziskind had once learned that time is created through deeds of true kindness. Days and hours and years are not time, but merely vessels for it, and too often they are empty. The world stands still, timeless and empty, until an act of generosity changes it in an instant and sends it soaring through arcs of rich seasons, moment after spinning moment of racing beauty. And then, with a single unkind deed, a single withheld hand, time ceases to exist.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“There's no such thing as a problem that's yours and not mine.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“School is a terrible place, I have decided. There is nothing good about it except for math class. Everything else is a total waste of time. As I mentioned before I have done a lot of reading about prisons, and I notice that they always describe them as painted in very dull colors, and my school is also painted in these kinds of colors, with greenish lockers and brownish walls and grayish floors. Actually they recently fixed up one wing of the school, and now that part of the school is just the opposite—all the colors are really bright, with bright red and yellow lockers and blue doors and shiny white floors that are already all scuffed up. It's funny because I thought the other colors were terrible but these are much worse, because they make it seem like it's normal to be happy there when it isn't.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Most of the other visitors were chained to their audio guides, looking only at what their little headsets told them was worth seeing.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“The bathroom was made of the finest materials, but underneath it all was nothing but shit.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Ben, everything is going to get better," he heard her say in the void. "Really. It has to get better, because it can't get worse."
Ben opened his eyes with a jolt, staring at himself in the mirror. That's not true, he suddenly thought. It can definitely get worse. As he nodded at Sara and pretended to smile, he understood that it was the first intelligent thought he had ever had.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“And the reward when good people die" - her mother paused, swallowed, paused again - "the reward when good people die is that they get to help make the people in their families who haven't been born yet. They pick out what kinds of traits they want the new people to have - they give them all the raw material of their souls, like their talents and their brains and their potential. Of course it's up to the new ones, once they're born, what they'll use and what they won't but that's what everyone who dies is doing, I think.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“another remarkable thing about the dead is that they are all ages, preserved at every age you ever knew them, and at no age at all”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“His unfinished book had become his obsession. He rarely left his room, which he insulated with sheaves of paper scribbled with beginnings and endings, nailing ideas to the walls and stretching long strips of sentences from the window to the door. Tall stacks of scenes and chapters sprouted from the floor, as if the papers had reincarnated themselves back into trees. The paper forest around him glimmered in the sun from the windows, weaving rays of light in yellow and purple and blue. Hunger squeezed his throat, but he turned his ravenousness toward writing. He almost never slept. During the shortages, he wrote between the columns of old newspapers, or on pieces of cardboard, or on bark pulled from trees. He traded potatoes for ink.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“What makes the soul who it is, if not the choices the person makes while he’s alive?”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Because once you're born you might feel all of those things," Boris was saying. "In any order. And you can't control it." Daniel looked up, but Boris had turned away from him, his eyes staring at the ground. He held him tighter. "Maybe it will never happen," Boris said, and blinked. "I hope it never will. But if it does, I want you to be prepared.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“he wondered if it was even possible to have happiness in a story, when one was required to imagine both a beginning and an end.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Mistakes are a very durable building material,” the mortal Daniel was saying. “Most people just throw them away as soon as possible and never realize that you can learn from them. But if you do, they can actually hold you up pretty well.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“Sometimes you can only have something you like for a short time, and after that you just have to be happy to have had it when you did, and enjoy the memory of it.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“You don’t believe in evil,” she said slowly. “For you everything is just a misunderstanding.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“There’s no such thing as a problem that’s yours and not mine.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“What made her angry was art that no one looked at, things that were hidden that needed to be seen.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“No one ever understands what happened with Adam and Eve. That story isn’t about sex. It’s about death. The forbidden desire isn’t love or lust—you can get that stuff anytime down at the public bath, even on earth. The forbidden desire is immortality.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“The artwork is just the settings, or the other characters. You have to make the plot yourself.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“youth is like a good card, which one can either play or hide under one’s vest.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come

“EVERYBODY AROUND HERE likes to pave their roads with good intentions,” the already-was Daniel muttered, “but those roads never seemed to get me anywhere. So I built this one out of stupid mistakes instead.”
― Dara Horn, The World to Come