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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Was there ever anything more predictable than human unkindness? Or more chilling than seeing how early it starts?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“In a sea of fragile young women she stood out as the one most likely to drown.”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“It happened to me the year I retired. You reach a certain age, and it all kicks in: Social Security, Medicare, and a fondness for hydrangeas.”
― 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.”
― 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

“Request from a book club moderator for a reader’s guide to one of my books. Sample questions helpfully included.
‘Which character do you find most sympathetic and why?
… If you could ask the author one question, what would it be?’
I give it a go.
Which of the characters in the book would you like most to go to bed with?
How do you imagine sex with that person would be? Rewrite the novel in your own words.
Explain why your version is superior?
Draw a mustache on the author photo. Would you have liked the book better if it had been written by a man?”
― Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

“Cuando era joven creía que era importanate recordar lo que ocurría en cada novela que leía. Ahora sé la verdad: lo que importa es lo que expirementas al leerla, los estados de ánimo que evoca la historia, las preguntas que te vienen a la mente, no tanto los hechos ficticios que describen".”
― Sigrid Nunez, Les vulnérables

“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

“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

“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