The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.

Like many women, she would always find it easier to feel for a male (except, of course, her husband, against whom she bore innumerable, lifelong, deadly grudges) than for any female.

In Dickens, of course, where this kind of thing happened all the time, it would all have been brought right in the end. There would have been heaps of suffering, heaps of trouble and misunderstanding. But even as you wept over those parts, you knew you were on your way to a happy ending, and you felt soothed. No wonder I loved Dickens then. No wonder I can’t read him today.

And it was true: if you didn’t treat Lily like a sensitive child, you felt like a brute.

Why are you being so irritable? said Rose. Because someone I used to love very much lies in a cold dark hole in the ground and I’ll never see her again.

And it struck me how unused I’d become to reading anything about men that puts them in a noble—or even a decent—light.

But when men appear in fiction now it’s usually to be criticized or denounced for something. The one thing you’re never prepared to hear is that the men will do the right thing.

And as a child I always knew that there was a difference between the ways your mother could protect you and the ways your father could protect you.

(What lockdown? went the viral tweet, describing it as rather “the middle class hiding while working-class people bring them things.” Another version: white people hiding while Black and brown people bring them things.

it seemed to me that this happiness might have been his response to my response; in other words, he was happy that he’d succeeded in making me happy. When I say, “Good boy,” of course I sound pleased. Then he repeats it to please me even more.

I thought of the depressed family therapist I once heard say that he’d met far too many people who’d somehow failed to calculate that having a baby meant one day having an adult.

Make society more equitable, liberals say, and sure, that sounds great. But bringing more people up to our affluent level is only going to destroy more ecosystems, kill off millions more plant and animal species, and make more and more of the earth uninhabitable. What really needs to be done is to get everyone living closer to poverty. But of course no one wants to hear that.

You have to learn from experience what a character in a story by Edna O’Brien states: that the reason love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.

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.

Never write “I don’t remember,” Editor says; it undermines your authority. But write as if you remember everything and Reader will smell a rat.

Some writers use pen names so that they can be more truthful; others, so that they can tell more lies.

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out, wrote H. L. Mencken.

Catastrophizing. A tendency to believe that the worst possible outcome is the inevitable one. The kind of wrong thinking that can lead to anxiety and depression. With the world on fire and its systems collapsing, here, there, and everywhere—with hope after hope turning out to have been merely false hope—what use is this diagnosis anymore?

By the time she slams the lid shut, one thing only remains, and that is hope. What? Meaning that, as part of Zeus’s punishment, hope would always be withheld? But what was hope doing in a box of evils to begin with?

We did not know the man’s true life—and if we didn’t know his life, how could we know his death? Whom, exactly, were we mourning?

There is a foolproof cure for writer’s block, according to a teacher I know: start with the words I remember.

one of my favorite books is I Remember by Joe Brainard.

I like Günter Grass’s definition of a writer as “a professional rememberer.”

And really, it was from her, wasn’t it, that I took in, early on, how much of life is shaped by sadness for what’s left behind.

Time passing was life passing, I thought. It was life that flowed swiftly along in one direction and could not be seized or stopped. And this was something that weighed on grown-ups, an inexorable force that they feared. My life, like everyone else’s, was passing, too—I

I simply asked him what did he want? It scares me, he said, but the truth is I don’t really want anything—not badly, anyway, not anything that I could actually have. Like, it scares me how so much of the time I don’t seem to feel anything.

in almost every long book I read I see a short one shirking its job.

Also Brian Moore’s idea that, while success makes you something that you weren’t before, failure makes you “a more intense distillation” of who you are.

But what’s so ominous is seeing this behavior on a massive scale. It’s like the whole world woke up one day and took a giant stupid pill.

Asked which writers or what books I believe will still be read in a hundred years, I remember what Stephen Hawking said: Humanity has only about a hundred years left on Earth. In 2017, Stephen Hawking said that.

Rilke’s words above my desk: “I have taken action against fear. I have sat up all night writing.”