The Last of Her Kind Quotes

“Are you a political prisoner, Dooley?"
Her blue eyes, immense now in her gaunt face, turned a pitying gaze on the reporter who'd asked her this. "Yes," she said. "And so are you.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

“I stopped keeping a journal long ago. But for many years of my life there have been periods when I did keep a journal, and those journals still exist. They can be found in the same cedar trunk with my other papers and documents. And yet I have never once taken them out. I have never had the desire to go open one of them, to check my memory against what is recorded there. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I opened one of my old journals, and I'm inclined to think I might never open one again. I wrote them, I kept them, but I have no curiosity, not the least interest in what they might tell me about the past today. Whatever happened, I prefer to re-create it. Even at the inevitable risk of getting some things wrong, I want this to be a work of pure memory and imagination. Instinct tells me that, what I'll have made will be closer to the truth.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

“Here are more lines from The Great Gatsby. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.

I like to remember when I was one of them, or to pretend that I am one of them still, sensing that restless man at my back and half turning, no, turning all the way, open-armed, saying, Pick me, pick me.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

“There was a code at Attica. But not Maryville. The women couldn’t trust one another. No loyalty. Loyalty was king at Attica. There was a sense of honor that just did not exist among females. (“They ten times more likely to snitch.”) And in their own way men, or at least the majority, he said, were more willing to abide by the rules.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

“There was the secrecy that came from guilt (this in itself a bourgeois invention), and the secrecy that came when one individual or group desired to keep hold of its power over other individuals”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

“It was the existence of social inequity and the evils it gave rise to that in turn gave rise to the evil of secrecy.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Last of Her Kind

“[Ann] didn't approve of the contributions her parents made to large cultural institutions like the Lincoln Center...The Draytons were also big givers to programs to save American wildlife and wilderness. "Because animals and trees are more important than people?" their daughter fumed. To be fair, her parents did, through their church, give to Connecticut's poor. But Ann was not appeased, not when "they could give so much more." When I learned that what the Draytons did give altogether to various charities each year amounted to many times the cost of our entire college tuition, I was speechless. So they were sharing their wealth, weren't they, in a pretty big way? So they couldn't really be called bloodsucking parasites?

Ann set me straight. "Most of that money is tax deductible, don't forget. Do you think they would give a penny if it weren't?" I didn't know. But from the way Ann talked, you would have through her mother had stolen the money she spent on clothes and antiques from welfare mothers and the North Vietnamese.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“She said, "I wish I had been born poor." ("I wish I'd been born an Indian" - Robert Kennedy.) The ideal would have been to be born poor and black. But the counterculture was full of people in the grip of the same fantasy, with some - from street fighters to rock stars to flower children - even starting to believe they were black.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“[Ann] didn't approve of the contributions her parents made to large cultural institutions like the Lincoln Center...The Draytons were also big givers to programs to save American wildlife and wilderness. "Because animals and trees are more important than people?" their daughter fumed. To be fair, her parents did, through their church, give to Connecticut's poor. But Ann was not appeased, not when "they could give so much more." When I learned that what the Draytons did give altogether to various charities each year amounted to many times the cost of our entire college tuition, I was speechless. So they were sharing their wealth, weren't they, in a pretty big way? So they couldn't really be called bloodsucking parasites?
Ann set me straight. "Most of that money is tax deductible, don't forget. Do you think they would give a penny if it weren't?" I didn't know. But from the way Ann talked, you would have through her mother had stolen the money she spent on clothes and antiques from welfare mothers and the North Vietnamese.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“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

“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

“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