Quotes from Sigrid Nunez

I confess to sudden rages. Walking in Midtown, rush hour's peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how is it even possible that all of them, these perfectly ordinary people, should be alive, when you --

The sound of a pen scratching in the night is a holy sound.

Do everything you can to get men to look at you, and when they do, pretend they don't exist. Because only a slut looks back. Is that perfectly clear? Early lesson on the female condition.

He is convinced--and what immigrant isn't?--that all Americans are crazy.

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.

Now, even as you completed your conquest of Wife One, our friendship grew. It would outlast all my other friendships. It would bring me intense happiness. And I felt lucky; I had suffered, but unlike others I never got my heart broken. (Didn't you? a therapist once goaded me. Wife Two was not the only one who found something unhealthy about our relationship, not was the therapist the only one to wonder if it hadn't been a factor in my remaining single all these years.)

The only animal that commits suicide is also the only animal that weeps. Though I've heard that stags brought to bay, exhausted from the hunt, with no escape from the hounds, sometimes shed tears. Crying elephants have also been reported, and of course people will tell you anything about their cats and dogs.

There was a code at Attica. But not Maryville. The women couldn't trust one another. No loyalty. Loyalty was king at Attica. There was a sense of honor that just did not exist among females. ("They ten times more likely to snitch.") And in their own way men, or at least the majority, he said, were more willing to abide by the rules.

Yes, of course, there are also nice people... But we all know niceness is never as interesting to write, or read, about.

Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

I Am the Architect of My Own Destiny

Socrates to Phaedrus: "I'm a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything.")

Once, when we were walking together on a campus outside the city, a chipmunk zipped across our path and dove into a hole at the base of an oak tree. "Oh, look at that," she said. "Just like Walt Disney.

She was so New York. And in her boosterism, in her energy and ambition, in her can-do, beat-whatever-the-odds spirit, in her childlike nature—and in her belief in her exceptionalism and in the power of her own will, in self-creation, and in the possibility of being reborn, the possibility of endless new chances, and of having it all—she was also the most American person I knew.

Cell phones do not belong in fiction, an editor once scolded in the margin of one of my manuscripts, and ever since - more than two decades now - I have wondered at the disconnect between tech-filled life and techless story.

Say what you would about the pandemic, at least it had helped slow down the rat race. It had also got people thinking more about the world to come. In communities like Salvation City, life had become simpler and more purpose-driven. People were sticking closer to home, spending more time with their families. And everywhere church attendance had soared.

They hold each other tightly for a few moments as the dog, a miniature dachshund, barks and leaps at them.

Academic joke making the rounds: Professor A: Have you read that book? Professor B: Read it? I haven't even taught it yet.

What's new is the idea that it's the people with the history of greatest injustice who have the greatest right to be heard, and that the time has come for the arts not just to make room for them but to be dominated by them.

His father used to accuse his mother of not being able to let anything go. She needed to learn to put the past behind her, instead of dwelling on what couldn't be changed. Don't be like your mother, he warned Cole, unless you want to be depressed.

But compared to Germany, the U.S. might as well be in the Third World, especially if we're talking about health care. Why did every other advanced country get through the pandemic so much better than the U.S.? Maybe you don't feel it so much here in the sticks, but out there people are still really suffering.

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see.

There's a certain kind of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?

They don't read, and they can't write to save their lives. They've never heard of most of the presidents of the United States, they think America won the war in Vietnam, they think Prohibition was a law that made it illegal to own slaves. That was Cole's father, fuming about his students. Cole suspects at least some of this could also be said about Tracy. And it's not just what they don't know, it's what they don't want to know. Tracy is what his father would call intellectually lazy.