Sigrid Nunez Quotes

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.

A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can't possibly produce a good book.You cannot hope to console yoursel...

Rather than write about what you know, you told us, write about what you Assume that you know very little and that you'll never know much until you learn how to see.

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

Music has charms to soothe a savage breaste 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,...

[Brodsky] loved cats, and sometimes for a greeting would meow.

I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human

Writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn’t something you have to share with other people.

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. Rebecca West.

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

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: i...

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...

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 abo...

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.

You can't hurry love, as the song goes. You can't hurry grief either.

I was not the only one who made the mistake of thinking that, because it was something you talked about a lot, it was something you wouldn't do. And after all, you were not the unhappiest person we kn...

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.

Do what is difficult because it is difficult. Do what will cost you the most. Who

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.

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, th...