The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A pause here to confess, not without shame: I never heard the news that you’d fallen in love without experiencing a pang, nor could I suppress a surge of joy each time I heard that you were breaking up with someone.” (The Friend Quotes)
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Another question: why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered in learning to read.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Certain ancient sages held that voluntary death, though generally to be condemned, could be morally acceptable, even honorable, as an escape from unbearable pain, melancholy, or disgrace—or even just plain old boredom.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won’t hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happens, and to me it happens all the time (and more and more as I get older), the effect is so disheartening that I now open old favorites warily.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“He has to forget you. He has to forget you and fall in love with me. That’s what has to happen.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“I don’t want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you. It’s a cliche, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial – people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who were very good with words – the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“I know this is all moronically anthropomorphic, but sometimes that is the form love takes.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“I like that, well before T.S. Eliot expressed himself on the matter, Samuel Butler stated that the severest test of the imagination was naming a cat.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it’s all my fault again, isn’t it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“If we could talk to animals, goes the song. Meaning, if they could talk to us. But of course that would ruin everything.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about – also mostly college students – the internet barely exists.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don’t want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“It’s not uncommon to wish to have known what a person you’ve come to love was like before you met them. It hurts, almost, not to have known what a beloved was like as a child. I have felt this way about every man I’ve ever been in love with, and about many close friends as well, and now it’s how I feel about Apollo.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Music has charms to soothe a savage breasted 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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much. But how would it be if that feeling was gone? I would not want that to happen. I told the shrink: it would not make me happy at all not to miss him anymore.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“On the fate of the multitude of unwanted dogs, Lucy reflects: They do us the honor of treating us like gods, and we respond by treating them like things.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It’s not for another to use it for fiction.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“She sometimes has panic attacks before class. Hence the meditation, sometimes supplemented with benzodiazepine.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Strays is what a writer I recently read calls those who, for one reason or another, and despite whatever they might have wanted earlier in life, never really become a part of life, not in the way most people do. They may have serious relationships, they may have friends, even a sizable circle, they may spend large portions of their time in the company of others. But they never marry and they never have children. On holidays, they join some family or other group. This goes on year after year, until they finally find it in themselves to admit that they’d really rather just stay home.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Sure I worried that writing about it might be a mistake. You write a thing down because you’re hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion. But there’s always the danger of the opposite happening. 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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“The only animal that commits suicide is also the only animal that weeps.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“The poet Rilke once reported seeing a dying dog give its mistress a look full of reproach. Later, he gave this experience to the narrator of a novel: He was convinced I could have prevented it. It was now clear that he had always overrated me. And there was no time left to explain it to him. He continued to gaze at me, surprised and solitary, until it was over.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“The problem of self-loathing isn’t new. 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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“There’s a certain type of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“They hold each other tightly for a few moments as the dog, a miniature dachshund, barks and leaps at them.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“When people are very young they see animals as equals, even as kin. That humans are different, unique and superior to all other species – this they have to be taught.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he’d gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn’t become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I’m writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Who doesn’t know that the dog is the epitome of devotion? But it’s this devotion to humans, so instinctual that it’s given freely even to persons who are unworthy of it, that has made me prefer cats. Give me a pet that can get along without me.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“Writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn’t something you have to share with other people.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“You can’t hurry love, as the song goes. You can’t hurry grief either.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
“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.”
Sigrid Nunez
The Friend
