#Sigrid Nunez

[mikedawwwson]

What Are You Going Through

Published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, 4/2/23

[woundgallery]

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

[quotespile]

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

Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

[lillyli-74]

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..

~Sigrid Nunez

[whisperthatruns]

"It was an uncertain spring." I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I'd looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. [...] I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey.

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)

[localcosmicvoid]

Balancing the melancholy in all the spring bright.

From What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez // Woman At Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi // Forward from A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

[mythologyofblue]

“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.” -Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

[dk-thrive]

I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading

I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I’d looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t. Always instead the emphasis is on what you remembered.

— Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables: A Novel (Riverhead Books, November 7, 2023)

[iseetheworldinmetaphor]

When I think of the men I've been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing.

–Sigrid Nunez

[litsnaps]

[lazyydaisyyy]

If it is true that an inability to deal with the future is a sign of mental disturbance, I don't know anyone who is not now disturbed; who has not been disturbed for some time.

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

[oracleofmadness]

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

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (pg 45)

[woundgallery]

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

[quotespile]

I 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. 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.

Sigrid Nunez, The Friend

[quotessentially]

From Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend

[whisperthatruns]

The problem with any first sentence, said Joan Didion, is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. Before beginning, too many options. Then, in the next breath, none. When you can't sleep, goes an old cure for insomnia, start telling yourself the story of your life. For some reason, writer's block has always felt to me like a kind of insomnia. I like that Norman Mailer said there's a touch of writer's block in a writer's work every day. I don't remember who said, Insomnia is the inability to forget. When you're having trouble writing, get up, go out, take a walk in the street. You will discover that certain streets exist precisely for this purpose. Once, I saw a man---homeless by the look of him---digging through the trash. He pulled out a couple of sheets of newspaper, examined them, and threw them back. Fishing deeper, he hauled up a magazine, squinted at the cover, and threw it back. Shit, he said, walking away. There ain't nothing to read in these fucking cans anymore.

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)