The Vulnerables Quotes

“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. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Which three authors, dead or alive, would you invite to a literary dinner party? is a question often asked of authors interviewed for The New York Times Book Review. What Edmund White said James Merrill said about a young fan: “Why does he want to meet us in the flesh? Doesn’t he realize the best part of us is on the page and all he’ll be meeting is an empty hive?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“the reason love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“written a whole book based on his experiences as a Cuban American, including learning English as a second language. His position in academia and in the literary community was based entirely on this bogus vita. Now that the truth was out, people were torn. Many were outraged by what they saw as a betrayal of trust and an unforgivable act of cultural appropriation. Others believed that, wrong though it was, the deception might be pardoned in light of what a good teacher he was known to have been.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“While success makes you someone you weren’t before, failure makes you a more intense distillation of who you are.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“It was an uncertain spring.’”

“ASKED: Whom would you want to write your life story? Someone with a gorgeous style and a great big loving and forgiving heart.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“I believe there are more good people in the world than bad people. What does not follow, though, is that, thanks to the numbers, the good will prevail. What cannot be left out of account is that, under certain circumstances, the bad can get the good to act badly, and furthermore, in order to achieve certain goals—victory in wartime, for example—getting the good to act badly rises to the level of a necessity.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“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. They should teach you this in school, but they don’t. Always instead the emphasis is on what you remembered. Otherwise, how could you write a critique? How could you pass an exam? How could you ever get a degree in literature? I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey. What stayed with me all this time after reading The Years was how it opened, with that first sentence, followed by a description of the weather.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“There once was a poet who read to an audience a poem about a brother’s death. After the reading, a woman came up to the poet to say how meaningful the poem had been for her, for she, too, had lost a brother. When the poet told her that in fact he didn’t have a brother, the woman was outraged. He might as well have slapped her in the face.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“a kid.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“That hope remains has been a common reading of the myth: no matter what evils are visited upon us, no matter how much suffering we must endure, there is always the blessing and comfort of hope to help us through.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“I like that Alan Bennett said, For a writer, nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people, because, however dreadful, it may be of use.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“I like how Lily Tomlin used to introduce one part of her act: The following skit is about my parents. I have changed their names to protect their identities.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“like the student in my graduate fiction-writing class who said, I’ve read your novels and there’s one thing I have to ask: Do you make some of that stuff up?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“I imagined this sort of ranting had played some part in his parents’ not being able to stand living with him.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“What really needs to be done is to get everyone living closer to poverty. But of course no one wants to hear that.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“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.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“A captive-bred wild animal is still a wild animal, he said. And why do people breed parrots that they know are never going to live in the wild? And when they can’t be sure what kind of people those birds are going to end up with? To make money, that’s all. That’s the only reason. They’re the ones who should be in jail. There’s only one excuse for owning a wild bird, he said, and that’s if it’s a rescue. And there are plenty of those.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“She didn’t take him out of the wild, I said. She got him from a breeder. He shot me a look of disdain.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“I believe in human biophilia. I believe that an affinity with other living things, a desire to be near and connect with them, and a love of natural beauty are in our DNA. How to square this, though, with what anyone living in our day can see: the human drive to make the world increasingly ugly, and, in the end, to trash it.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“If we’d paid more attention, from the beginning, how much might we have learned about what it means to be an animal, how to live in nature, with which human animals have so often been at such destructive odds.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“I’m asking, said Rose, why is saying red a better way to say stop than stop?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Anthropomorphism: we should have made it our religion, I once heard an environmental activist say. Irrational, but then what religion is not. And consider how many more irrational beliefs people have always embraced.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“[Of the documentary film My Octopus Teacher, made by Craig Foster:]

Gentleness is the most important thing that hours and hours in nature can teach, Foster says.

She made me feel just how precious wild places are, he says. You start to care about all the animals, even the tiniest ones, you understand how highly vulnerable these animals' lives are, how vulnerable all lives are. You start to think about your own vulnerability and about death, your own death.

And in the hours and hours he spent exploring the kelp forest, he was stunned repeatedly by the intelligence--the genius--of what he calls the forest mind, a great underwater brain developed over eons, and the intricate work it does to keep everything balanced.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Some writers use pen names so that they can be more truthful; others, so that they can tell more lies.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“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.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“All your work fitting neatly into just one book--how elegant. How dignified. Not taking up too much space in the world. Not asking for too much attention. What writer wants to look back and think, I wrote too much? But probably true of most.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“It's only natural, Violet said. Everyone past a certain age is in a state of mourning for their youth.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Fears of the future roiled me--not just the big ones I shared with everyone else, like the fear of contracting the virus and perhaps even dying, or of the consequences of our increasingly dark and chaotic politics--but petty ones inspired by the most mundane aspects of my life.

I had lost all confidence in myself to accomplish ordinary tasks. I would lie in bed, obsessing about my to-do list, watching helplessly as--thanks to the many obstacles my mind kept generating--it twisted into a list of the not-doable.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“I believe people are more good than bad. When Obama said this he was only repeating what many have said before. Another version: I believe there are more good people in the world than bad people. What does not follow, though, is that, thanks to the numbers, the good will prevail. What cannot be left out of account is that, under certain circumstances, the bad can get the good to act badly, and furthermore, in order to achieve certain goals--victory in wartime, for example--getting the good to act badly rises to the level of a necessity.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables