Quotes from Sigrid Nunez

Death the only god who must come when he's called

It is widely believed that although animals don't know that one day they'll die, many of them do know when they're actually dying. So at what point does a dying animal become aware of what's happening? Could it possibly be a long time before? And how do animals respond to aging? Are they completely puzzled, or do they somehow intuit what the signs mean? Are these foolish questions? I acknowledge that they are. And yet they preoccupy me.

Dogs are the best mourners in the world, as everyone knows. Joy Williams.)

Is this the madness at the heart of it? Do I believe that if I am good to him, if I act selflessly and make sacrifices for him, do I believe that if I love Apollo - beautiful, aging, melancholy Apollo - I will wake one morning to find him gone and you in his place, back from the land of the dead?

The severest test of the imagination is naming a cat

LOL-inspiring thought: Wouldn't it

It was the existence of social inequity and the evils it gave rise to that in turn gave rise to the evil of secrecy.

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. • • •

There was the secrecy that came from guilt (this in itself a bourgeois invention), and the secrecy that came when one individual or group desired to keep hold of its power over other individuals

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.

It's always good to start off anything by breaking a rule.

She indulged his long-winded Tolstoy bashing (he saw Tolstoy, "in no way equal to Dostoevsky," as a kind of highbrow Margaret Mitchell who had helped prepare the way for socialist realism)

Only those who are writers, it seems, get to say what happened

Let's look to this day, and only this day. This gift of a perfect summer morning.

The exhaustion of mourning was my thought.

But how puzzling human unhappiness must be to them. We who can fill our dishes any time and with as much food as we like, who can go outside whenever we wish, and run free—we who have no masters constantly needing to be pleased or obeyed— WTF?

What we miss - what we lose and what we mourn - isn't it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are.

The mindfulness rage was just another distraction, he said. Of course we should be stressed, he said. We should be utterly consumed with dread. Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said.

He was saying that perhaps it was a mistake to bring human beings into a world that had such a strong possibility of becoming, in their lifetimes, a bleak and terrifying if not wholly unlivable place.

Having your dog is like having a part of you here.

Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.

Women are dangerous, they stop at nothing and they never let go.

If I bring him home though, I swear he'll spend the rest of his life waiting by the door. And he deserves better than that, don't you think?' Yes, I think, my heart breaking. You can't explain death. And love deserves better than that.

Self-care, relieving one's own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society's highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself. The mindfulness rage was just another distraction.