The Vulnerables

by Sigrid Nunez

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.

Can it be accidental that the names for flowers are also always beautiful words? Rose. Violet. Lily. Names so appealing that people choose them for their baby girls.

Something is missing. Something has been lost. I believe this is at the heart of why I write.

But the feeling has survived and will not go away: I want to know why I feel as though I have been mourning all my life.

An ordinary boy who had nothing against you could take you down, could make it so that, even with your whole life ahead of you, you could want not to live anymore.

The one thing you’re never prepared to hear is that the men will do the right thing.

But I also know that, very often, when I take comfort from the presence of men, it has everything to do with their masculinity. 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.

(Was there ever anything more predictable than human unkindness? Or more chilling than seeing how early it starts?)

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.

there is no narrative more prone to distortion than the memory of a love gone wrong.

I can tell the story of my life in just four words. Good times, bad times.

There’s no understanding people’s behavior these days. Don’t even try.

How Nietzsche saw it: Of course hope is an evil. In reality it is the worst of all evils, he said, for it prolongs the torments of man.