Quotes from Sigrid Nunez

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.

When I was a kid and wanted to grow up to be a writer, I assumed I would be writing about animals and children because that's what I cared about and read about. But I never did.

I first met Susan Sontag in spring 1976 when she was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help type her correspondence. I had been recommended by the editors of 'The New York Review of Books,' where I'd worked as an editorial assistant.

It's true that if you cry hard enough for long enough, you can end up with blurred vision.

Working at the 'Review', if anything, the impression you got was, 'I'll never be good enough. I'll never work hard enough. I'll never be devoted enough.' These people are staying up all night over their sentences!

It all sounds much crazier now than it did at the time, but even back then I wasn't sure how Ann could possibly believe all this - though I never doubted she was in earnest. She was never not in earnest. And there was no touch of the hypocrite about her.

She said, I wish I had been born poor. (I wish I'd been born an Indian - Robert Kennedy.) The ideal would have been to be born poor and black. But the counterculture was full of people in the grip of the same fantasy, with some - from street fighters to rock stars to flower children - even starting to believe they were black.

I don't want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you. It's a cliche, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial - people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who were very good with words - the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.

Another question: why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?

Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.

Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle.

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 to its vomit.

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.

If we could talk to animals, goes the song. Meaning, if they could talk to us. But of course that would ruin everything.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, "What are you going through?" —Simone Weil

You didn't think it was possible for a woman to wander the streets in the same spirit and manner as a man. A female pedestrian was subject to constant disruptions: stares, comments, catcalls, gropes. A woman was raised to be always on guard: Was this guy walking too close? Was that guy following her? How, then, could she ever relax enough to experience the loss of sense of self, the joy of pure being that was the ideal of true flânerie?

I've known plenty of women who brace themselves whenever they leave the house, even a few who try to avoid leaving the house. Of course, a woman has only to wait until she's a certain age, when she becomes invisible, and—problem solved.

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.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. (quoting Doris Lessing)

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.

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.

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

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.

Graffiti on Philosophy Hall: The examined life ain't worth it either.