Quotes from Sigrid Nunez

Weren't there millions upon millions of people suffering from various humanitarian crises that millions upon millions of other people simply chose to forget? Why could we not turn our attention to the teeming sufferers already in our midst? And here, perhaps, was a last chance for us to redeem

ourselves, the man raised his voice to say. The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To love and forgive one another as best we

to talk like that, like there's no hope, I don't know, that just seems wrong to me. I don't think anyone has the right to tell people there's no hope. You can't just get up and tell people there's no hope! And it doesn't make sense. He thinks you can take away people's hope and then expect them to—what did he say?—love and take care of each other?

And if that's what he had to do in order not to suffer, on top of everything else, the pain of guilt, that's all right with me. That's all right with me.

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. 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.

At times I can barely contain my anger at students. How can you be an English major and not know that you don't put a period after a question mark? Why do even graduate students not know the difference between a novel and a memoir, and why do they keep referring to full-length books as "pieces"?

People ought to be able to understand that this is my way of fighting, she says. Cancer can't get me if I get me first. And what's the sense in waiting, she says, when I'm ready to go.

Why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?

It's in the nature of many dogs to do some kind of work, training manuals say (assigned a task, dogs showing signs of boredom or depression often perk up), but people almost never give them enough - if anything - to do.

Sounds like that's one of the ways your loss has affected you: not wanting to be with other people.

Later many people would say that if the schools had been closed right away, lives might have been saved. But at the time people argued that you couldn't just close the schools, because so many parents worked. If they had to stay home to take care of their kids, a lot of them would lose income, maybe even their jobs. Not to mention that businesses were already shorthanded because of all the employees out sick. Closing the schools might just make things worse.

I believe that fear of being a failure plays a large part in goading many women who are ambivalent about motherhood into maternity. That, and the fear of missing out

And just because there are other people who've lost someone to suicide doesn't mean that what I'm feeling is something that can be shared.

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.

One day we were planning our future, she said, the next day he was gone. At first I thought I owed it to him to do everything possible to try to understand. But I came to believe this was wrong. He had chosen silence. His death was a mystery. In the end I decided I should leave him his silence. His mystery.

From Addy in Berlin came the news that all social gatherings had been banned except for weddings and funerals, where the number of people could not be higher than twelve. (I wonder if that's counting the bride and groom, Cole's mother said, and his father joked: How about the corpse?)

She believed that, in our culture, at least, people were much freer than they thought they were and had more options than they seemed willing to acknowledge.

My mother sobbed. I'm not asking for that much. But she was: She was asking him to be someone else.

You caught some flak for questioning whether there could really be such a thing as a flâneuse. 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

She swiftly disabused us of certain notions acquired at school. America is the land of equal opportunity. All men are brothers. The best things in life are free.

talk about the times I see you. Each time my heart turns over. But why should it be that almost always the person I mistake for you is someone who looks like you not at the age when you died but at some other stage of your life.

old. Letter eight contains his famous vision of the Beauty and the Beast myth: Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Words often quoted, or paraphrased

I had discovered the miraculous possibility that art holds out to us: to be a part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time.

She worried about his father's fever, but couldn't say how high it was, the thermometer being one of several items that had managed somehow to get lost in the move from Chicago. And there were no more thermometers to be found at the drugstore. And once they'd used up the aspirin they had on hand, that was it. Like surgical masks and thermometers, cold and flu medication had run out everywhere. Rubbing alcohol, mouthwash, bleach--anything containing germ killer was also sold out.