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9d2aba1
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What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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4dc57f7
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Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?
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Sigrid Nunez |
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70e6d6d
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Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won't hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happens, and to me it happens all the time (and more and more as I get older), the effect is so disheartening that I now open old favorites warily.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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0fcdc77
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Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I'll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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f307bf3
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Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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7d7e542
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You can't hurry love, as the song goes. You can't hurry grief either.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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624bdcd
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In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren't often fists.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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e3aa3f4
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If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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f859775
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Sure I worried that writing about it might be a mistake. You write a thing down because you're hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion. But there's always the danger of the opposite happening. Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it. Like people whose memories of places they've traveled to are in fact only m..
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Sigrid Nunez |
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707c1d5
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I know this is all moronically anthropomorphic, but sometimes that is the form love takes.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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3f96f42
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There's a certain type of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?
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Sigrid Nunez |
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e1e85dc
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Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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47183ea
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He has to forget you. He has to forget you and fall in love with me. That's what has to happen.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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403fe14
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If we could talk to animals, goes the song. Meaning, if they could talk to us. But of course that would ruin everything.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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7ba8f63
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Strays is what a writer I recently read calls those who, for one reason or another, and despite whatever they might have wanted earlier in life, never really become a part of life, not in the way most people do. They may have serious relationships, they may have friends, even a sizable circle, they may spend large portions of their time in the company of others. But they never marry and they never have children. On holidays, they join some ..
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Sigrid Nunez |
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829c53a
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The poet Rilke once reported seeing a dying dog give its mistress a look full of reproach. Later, he gave this experience to the narrator of a novel: He was convinced I could have prevented it. It was now clear that he had always overrated me. And there was no time left to explain it to him. He continued to gaze at me, surprised and solitary, until it was over.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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cd27ea3
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Because it's all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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d6f2c13
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Nothing has changed. It's still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink: it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore.
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grief
love
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Sigrid Nunez |
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f21e08c
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During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. ..
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Sigrid Nunez |
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143eed0
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A pause here to confess, not without shame: I never heard the news that you'd fallen in love without experiencing a pang, nor could I suppress a surge of joy each time I heard that you were breaking up with someone.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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a056b4d
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Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he'd gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn't become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I'm writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog ..
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Sigrid Nunez |
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595f73c
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Are you a political prisoner, Dooley?" Her blue eyes, immense now in her gaunt face, turned a pitying gaze on the reporter who'd asked her this. "Yes," she said. "And so are you."
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Sigrid Nunez |
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8580c89
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Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow.
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important-facts
joseph-brodsky
sigrid-nunez
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Sigrid Nunez |
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c118a12
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What we miss--what we lose and what we mourn--isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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9eb4815
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When people are very young they see animals as equals, even as kin. That humans are different, unique and superior to all other species - this they have to be taught.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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f14d6db
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When did she plant the roses. In full magnificent bloom now, the red and the white. A fragrance to make you go, Aaah. I think how much they must have pleased her, year after year, and made her proud. And it's not the thought that she must miss them, but that she's no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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a258fe7
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writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn't something you have to share with other people.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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56608d2
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How good is his memory? If very good, as dogs' memories are said to be, what grief being locked up alone might bring him. And - heart-shredding thought - is it still for you that he waits by the door?)
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Sigrid Nunez |
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020134c
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Who doesn't know that the dog is the epitome of devotion? But it's this devotion to humans, so instinctual that it's given freely even to persons who are unworthy of it, that has made me prefer cats. Give me a pet that can get along without me.
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dogs
self-reliance
devotion
pets
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Sigrid Nunez |
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c830ffe
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Another question: why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?
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Sigrid Nunez |
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ed825ea
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That there could be something in the world that a woman could want more than children has been viewed as unacceptable. Things may be marginally different now, but, even if there is something she wants more than children, that is no reason for a woman to remain childless. Any normal woman, it is understood, wants--and should want--both.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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75f7713
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Here are more lines from The Great Gatsby. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. I like to remember when I was one of them, or to pretend that I am one of them still, sensing that restless man at my back and half turning, no, turning all the way, open-armed, saying, .
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Sigrid Nunez |
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492d386
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There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. (quoting Doris Lessing)
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Sigrid Nunez |
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16c4d78
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It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about - also mostly college students - the internet barely exists.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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80dd81f
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It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don't want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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54ed425
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They don't commit suicide. They don't weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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79819b6
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I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it's all my fault again, isn't it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes.
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dogs-and-humans
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Sigrid Nunez |
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924beae
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The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they'll say even before I write them.
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grief
loss
omniscience
unreality
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Sigrid Nunez |
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e880a45
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there is at least one book in you that cannot be written by anyone else but you. My advice is to dig deep and find
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Sigrid Nunez |
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598d450
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Wouldn't it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?
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Sigrid Nunez |
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e939fc5
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Music has charms to soothe a savage breaste is what the playwright William Congreve actually wrote. But it's part of our mythology: a wild or angry animal calmed or tamed by music. Which makes sense, given all we know about how music can affect the spirits of a human being.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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601df5b
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She sometimes has panic attacks before class. Hence the meditation, sometimes supplemented with benzodiazepine.
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Sigrid Nunez |
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dc425f7
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a poet announced to the workshop she was teaching that semester: I may not be here next week. Later, at home, she put on her mother's old fur coat and, with a glass of vodka in hand, shut herself in her garage. The mother's old fur coat is the kind of detail writing teachers like to point out to students, one of those telling details--like how Simenon's daughter got her gun--that are found in abundance in life but are mostly absent from stu..
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Sigrid Nunez |
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5f6aa84
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I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn't do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we knew. You were not the most depressed (think of G, of D, or T-R). You were not even - strange as it now sounds to say - the most suicidal. Because of the timing, so near the start of the year, it was possible to think that it had been a resoluti..
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Sigrid Nunez |