The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

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 are very good with words—the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.

no matter how earnest one set out to be, the ink of parody seeped through.

It is interesting that people have always taken such behavior as examples of extreme loyalty rather than extreme stupidity or some other mental defect.

I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can’t possibly produce a good book.

You had to have ambition, serious ambition, and if you wanted to do really good work you had to be driven. You had to want to surpass what others had done. You had to believe that what you were doing was incredibly serious and important. And all this seemed to me in conflict with learning to sit still. To let go.

But we all know niceness is never as interesting to write, or read, about.)

Remember, the last thing you want is for him to start thinking you’re his bitch.

It hurts, almost, not to have known what a beloved was like as a child.

a trace of which has been carried into adulthood: the wish not to be part of the human race.

deploring egotism in novelists is like deploring violence in boxers.

Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it.

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.