What Are You Going Through Quotes

“The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I don't know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does. Writers know this only too well, they know it better than anyone else, and that is why the good ones sweat and bleed over their sentences, the best ones break themselves into pieces over their sentences, because if there is any truth to be found they believe it will be found there.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Neither season after season of extreme weather events nor the risk of extinction for a million animal species around the world could push environmental destruction to the top of our country’s list of concerns. And how sad, he said, to see so many among the most creative and best-educated classes, those from whom we might have hoped for inventive solutions, instead embracing personal therapies and pseudo-religious practices that promoted detachment, a focus on the moment, acceptance of one’s surroundings as they were, equanimity in the face of worldly cares. (This world is but a shadow, it is a carcass, it is nothing, this world is not real, do not mistake this hallucination for the real world.) Self-care, relieving one’s own everyday anxieties, avoiding stress: these had become some of our society’s highest goals, he said—higher, apparently, than the salvation of society itself. The mindfulness rage was just another distraction, he said. Of course we should be stressed, he said. We should be utterly consumed with dread. Mindful meditation might help a person face drowning with equanimity, but it would do absolutely nothing to right the Titanic, he said. It wasn’t individual efforts to achieve inner peace, it wasn’t a compassionate attitude toward others that might have led to timely preventative action, but rather a collective, fanatical, over-the-top obsession with impending doom.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Someone has said, When you are born into this world there are at least two of you, but going out you are on your own. Death happens to every one of us, yet it remains the most solitary of human experiences, one that separates rather than unites us.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I think it's largely true, what I once heard a famous playwright say, that there are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you'd discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying? But is it too much to want somebody somewhere to say something original about it? Not”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, “What are you going through?” —Simone Weil”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“No matter how hard we try to put the most important things into words, it is always like toe-dancing in clogs.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“What if all this time we have misunderstood the story of the Tower of Babel?…What if it was not just to different tribes but to each individual human being that a separate language was given, unique as fingerprints. And, step two, to make life among humans even more strifeful and confounding, he beclouded their perception of this. So that while we might understand that there are many peoples speaking many different languages, we are fooled into thinking that everyone in our own tribe speaks the same language we do.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“George Balanchine said, If you put a group of men on the stage, you have a group of men, but if you put a group of women on the stage you have the whole world.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To love and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I have learned that there exist a word, onsra, in Bodo, a language spoken by the Bodo people in parts of northeastern India, that is used to describe the poignant emotion a person experiences when that person realizes that the love they have been sharing with another is destined not to endure. This word, which has no equivalent in English, has been translated as "to love for the last time." Misleading. Most English-speaking people would probably take "to love for the last time" to mean to have at long last found one's true love, enduring love. For example, in a song composed by Carole King called "Love for the Last Time." But when I first learned this translation of onsra I thought it meant something else entirely. I thought it meant to have experienced a love so overwhelming, so fierce and deep, that you could never ever ever love again.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Golden hour, magic hour, l’heure bleue. Evenings when the beauty of the changing sky made us both go still and dreamy. Sunlight falling at an angle across the lawn so that it touched our elevated feet, then moved up our bodies like a long slow blessing.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“That's deep, he said with just a hint of mockery. You a psychologist?

I told him I was a writer.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Woman A often thinks about growing old. At the same time, she often thinks back to those years when old age seemed a very distant thing, more like an option than a law of nature.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“This would explain much of human suffering, according to my ex, who was being less playful than you might think. He really did believe that’s how it was: each of us languaging on, our meaning clear to ourselves but to nobody else. Even people in love? I asked, smilingly, teasingly, hopefully. This was at the very beginning of our relationship. He only smiled back. But years later, at the bitter end, came the bitter answer: People in love most of all. —”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“there exists a word, onsra, in Bodo, a language spoken by the Bodo people in parts of northeastern India, that is used to describe the poignant emotion a person experiences when that person realizes that the love they have been sharing with another is destined not to endure.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“imagination would become memory:”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I’ve always hated the way the most powerful experiences so often end up resembling dreams.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“People ought to be able to understand that this is my way of fighting, she says. Cancer can’t get me if I get me first. And what’s the sense in waiting, she says, when I’m ready to go.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Understood: language would end up falsifying everything, as language always does.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Only those who are writers, it seems, get to say what happened”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I don’t know who it was, but someone, maybe or maybe not Henry James, said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who upon seeing someone else suffering think, That could happen to me, and those who think, That will never happen to me. The first kind of people help us to endure, the second kind make life hell.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“I just read a review of a book about some lab worker who purposely unleashes a pandemic flu virus in the hopes of killing enough humans to save the environment”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through

“Mas, você sabe”, eu disse, “essa sua ideia de as pessoas não terem filhos. O passo lógico seguinte não seria as pessoas começarem a se suicidar? Porque, afinal, tudo o que fazemos está, realmente, contribuindo para o problema. Cada vez que acendemos uma lâmpada, ou entramos em um carro, ou fazemos qualquer coisa do tipo, estamos usando recursos, poluindo a Terra, destruindo outras espécies e condenando nossos descendentes. Se um número suficiente de nós fizesse o sacrifício eliminando a nós mesmos... isso não ajudaria?”
“Isso não vai acontecer, obviamente.”
“Assim como as pessoas não vão parar de ter filhos.”
“Mas chegaremos a isso.”
“O quê?”
“Pessoas se suicidando para escapar do calor e da escassez de alimentos e de água potável. Muitas o farão antes de chegar a isso.”
“Você faria?”
“Não acho que eu traga isso em mim. Acho que a maioria das pessoas não traz, mesmo que pense que sim. Em todo caso, com exceção de uma guerra nuclear, nossa geração — aquela mesma que poderia ter evitado essa catástrofe — será poupada do pior.”
“Acabei de ler uma resenha de um livro sobre um assistente de laboratório que criou propositalmente um vírus de gripe pandêmica na esperança de matar um número suficiente de humanos para salvar o meio ambiente.”
“Ah, jura? E isso deu certo para o meio ambiente?”
“O resenhista não disse. Sabe como é, não queria dar spoiler.”
“Algum idiota fez piada sobre eu ser um spoiler. ‘Ah, não’, o sujeito tuitou, ‘agora sabemos como a vida na Terra termina’. Acho que quis ser espirituoso.”
“Apenas sarcástico, eu acho.”
“Estou relatando os fatos. Por que grande parte da reação é ser tão hostil comigo?”
“É a sua atitude”, respondi. “Você passa a impressão de ser ranzinza e arrogante... intimidador, até. E você não pode simplesmente chegar lá e dizer às pessoas que não há esperança.”
“Quer dizer, a verdade? Porque não se pode acreditar seriamente que as pessoas vão se recompor e mudar as coisas nos poucos anos que restam antes de chegarmos ao ponto irreversível.”
“Não sei. Mas há algo na maneira como você apresenta a verdade terrível, quase como se você sentisse prazer nela, como se isso lhe desse algum tipo de satisfação sombria. Em outras palavras, sua misantropia transparece.”
Ele riu. “Meu mecanismo de defesa, você quer dizer. Você não pode acreditar seriamente que tenho algum prazer em imaginar o sofrimento reservado a meus netos. Mas é verdade, eu também me sinto hostil. Todas as outras questões à parte, quem poderia perdoar aqueles norte-americanos — e estou falando de todos os privilegiados e instruídos — que elegeram um negacionista da mudança climática para o cargo mais poderoso do mundo, ou os CEOs do petróleo que encobriram as próprias pesquisas sobre a conexão entre os combustíveis fósseis e o aquecimento global desde quando alguma coisa ainda poderia ter sido feita a respeito? A enormidade disso extrapola todos os episódios de genocídio do mundo, na minha opinião. Não sei você, mas perdi completamente a fé na possibilidade de que as pessoas possam fazer a coisa certa.”
“Mas você deve ter alguma esperança, do contrário não continuaria palestrando.”
“É uma contradição, eu sei. Acho que quero ao menos ser capaz de olhar meus netos nos olhos quando eles tiverem idade suficiente para me perguntar onde você estava, o que você fez. E, mesmo que eu saiba que não há mais esperança de acordar a humanidade idiota a tempo, por que as pessoas não deveriam ouvir a verdade? Por que não deveriam, pelo menos, pensar, ainda que apenas durante o tempo dedicado a ler um artigo ou ouvir uma palestra, na própria estupidez monstruosa e no mal que poderiam ter impedido, mas não o fizeram? A verdade é que, toda vez que vejo um recém-nascido, meu coração aperta. Sinto-me terrivelmente zangado, mas também terrivelmente culpado o tempo todo. Estou fazendo o que faço agora porque não fiz mais antes. Desperdicei minha vida com coisas que, por mais importantes que parecessem na época, acabaram se revelando banais.”
― Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through