Quotes from Sigrid Nunez

Anthropomorphism, I've decided, is inescapable, and though I might try to hide it I no longer fight it.

When I ask him why he thinks I should have known that he was writing about himself, he looks puzzled and says, Who else would I be writing about?

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, Pick me, pick me .

could I justify doing something with my life, my one wild and precious life, that I knew, undone, would not be missed?

believe we must all retain, throughout our whole lives, a powerful memory of those early moments of life, a time when we were as much animal as human, the overwhelming feelings of helplessness and vulnerability and mute fear, and the yearning for the protection that our instinct tells us is there, if we could just cry loudly enough. Innocence is something we humans pass through and leave behind, unable to return.

Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow.

Idyllic is how Kundera describes human relationships with animals. Idyllic because animals were not expelled with us from Paradise. There they remain, untroubled by such complications as the separation of body and soul, and it's through our love and friendship with them that we are able to reconnect to Paradise, albeit by just a thread.

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.

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.

I just read a review of a book about some lab worker who purposely unleashes a pandemic flu virus in the hopes of killing enough humans to save the environment

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 memories of the pictures they took there. In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve of it. So it could happen: by writing about someone lost—or even just talking too much about them—you might be burying them for good.

Even worse. Making vivid, interesting characters out of those girls and women? Mythologizing and novelizing their suffering? No." The man gives an exaggerated sigh. "I know this argument, and I don't buy it. If everyone felt the way you do, the world would remain ignorant about things it has every good reason to know. Writers have to bear witness, it's their vocation. Some would say the writer has no higher calling than to bear witness to injustice and suffering.

And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people's prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.

people have said that were it not for suicide they could not go on.

Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you're alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?

I don't know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.

Find the right tone and you can write about anything

I believe the intensity of the pity you feel for an animal has to do with how it evokes pity for yourself.... Innocence is something we humans pass through and leave behind, unable to return. But animals live and die in that state, and seeing innocence violated in the form of cruelty to a mere duck can seem like the most barbaric act in the world.

That's deep, he said with just a hint of mockery. You a psychologist? I told him I was a writer.

Wouldn't it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?

I told the shrink: It would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore. You can't hurry love, as the song goes. You can't hurry grief, either.

No writing is ever wasted, you used to say. Even if something doesn't work out and you end up throwing it away, as a writer you always learn something.

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child' (109).

To draw me out, the therapist asks what I did for the holidays. When I tell him he says gently (he says everything gently), Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting to be with other people. Hating to be with other people, I don't say. Terrified of being with other people.