Lizzy

“I did not yet know that, contrary to youth's sense of itself as tolerant, freethinking, and egalitarian, it is more often stubbornly critical and judgmental, priggish and snobbish. I would find these faults much later (glaring) in my son and daughter and their friends. But at that age myself, I did not see how we truly were, nor did I put together that these faults were often worst in those with the strongest political opinions.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“But even before she got to college, Ann's thinking had become to change. She could no longer see herself working for the system. The system was corrupt through and through, she said, and you could not be a part of it without becoming corrupt yourself. So it was goodbye to that dream, as it was goodbye to "Dooley" and goodbye to horses. Oh, she would always love horses, she said, but equestrianism was on that growing list of things (along with tennis, weddings, monogamy, and cocktail parties) that she now called bourgeois affectations. (Sometimes she said, "That is such a B.A.," for short.)”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“It all sounds much crazier now than it did at the time, but even back then I wasn't sure how Ann could possibly believe all this - though I never doubted she was in earnest. She was never not in earnest. And there was no touch of the hypocrite about her.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind