Top 40 Nina Riggs Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Dammit,” my mom said a few weeks ago. “I can’t believe I’m going to die right when you’re in the middle of all this. It’s killing me.” One of her wry smiles.”

— Nina Riggs

2. “I love that she could go her whole life ardently loving purple, and then shift to an equally passionate affinity for orange less than a week before she died. It’s exactly like her: She had strong opinions but was never afraid to change them – to evolve or retract or alter. Her favorite way to start a sentence – “You know what your problem is?” – was closely rivaled by “You know what I was wrong about?”

— Nina Riggs

3. “I’m terrified. I’m fine. The world is changed and exactly as before. There are crows in my hair. I have no hair. Bring me a jug of wine. Bring me a kerchief to scrub spotlessly clean.”

— Nina Riggs

4. “For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown – and being okay with that.”

— Nina Riggs

5. “You’ll find grief is very strange,” she says as Clyde’s paws and jowls stop twitching. She is unmarried, has just lost her fifteen-year-old dachshund this year. “You think you have a handle on it, and then you don’t at all.”

— Nina Riggs

6. “Kinda cool, huh?” he says. “Interesting metaphor. We’re perfectly imperfect designs.”

— Nina Riggs

7. “He makes sense there in a way I have never made sense anywhere.”

— Nina Riggs

8. “Thank you for the taco casserole. It worked even better than my stool softeners. Thoughts and prayers are great, but Ativan and pot are better. Thank you for the flowers. I hope they die before I do. All your phone messages about how not knowing exactly what’s going on with me has stressed you out really helped me put things in perspective. Xanax is white, Zofran is blue, steroids make me feel like throttling you.”

— Nina Riggs

9. “She is far from a hole in my life. She is an enormous presence.”

— Nina Riggs

10. “I am trying to know myself. I want a better sense of what kind of mother the kids will remember me to be. It’s hard: I am not done becoming me. I am still in the works. I still aim to be softer in some places, firmer in others.”

— Nina Riggs

11. “It’s weird,” I say. “For me – I can’t find books dark enough right now.” The things I’m loving these days: things where everything is not okay, and that’s okay – or not. Montaigne incredulous: “Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?”

— Nina Riggs

12. “The drenched backyard full of runoff, and tiny, slimy, uncertain yard critters who had expected to remain buried in months of hard mud, peeking their heads out into the balmy New Year’s air, asking, Wait, what?”

— Nina Riggs

13. “At least I’m here with you.”

— Nina Riggs

14. “Sometimes the most important thing is knowing when to quit. Sometimes being heroic is knowing when to say enough is enough.”

— Nina Riggs

15. “When you fall in love with your kids, you fall in love forever.”

— Nina Riggs

16. “Reveal the pain, but hide the wreckage. I can hear Montaigne hollering: break it open, look inside, feel it, write it down.”

— Nina Riggs

17. “Sometimes I’m sad about everything; the way my grilled cheese sandwich tastes, how nice my socks feel, a song John is playing in the kitchen. One time he puts on this goofy Loudon Wainwright song that was on a mix tape I used to listen to during my commute from the boys’ school in Bethesda back into the District when we were newly married and everything was about to begin and it makes me burst into tears about the shortness of everything.”

— Nina Riggs

18. “My friends ask a new kind of question: How is today? I hope the pain is manageable today.”

— Nina Riggs

19. “We’re making our way like this, though: We are breathless, but we love the days. They are promises. They are the only way to walk from one night to the other.”

— Nina Riggs

20. “Of course they all remember; of course it is not only me, trying to both preserve and crack open the lie that time doesn’t pass, that loss isn’t a blade so sharp that it can make you bleed long before you ever feel the sting.”

— Nina Riggs

21. “It’s not anywhere as diabolical as the stunt that Ginny’s friend Lee and her husband pulled with their kids by telling them that when the ice cream truck’s music is playing that means the truck is out of ice cream.”

— Nina Riggs

22. “Here we are closer to something I am trying to understand: that openness to fear. We are hearts and stingers. We ride the tide. We believe in resistance; we are made both of fight and float.”

— Nina Riggs

23. “Downstairs, the boys gaze at a screen on the old futon in the playroom. We will figure out what to do about them soon enough. They probably already know what’s up and are waiting for us to figure out how to say it. Their very existence is the one dark piece I cannot get right within all this. I can let go of a lot of things: plans, friends, career goals, places in the world I want to see, maybe even the love of my life. But I cannot figure out how to let go of mothering them.”

— Nina Riggs

24. “It’s a beautiful, human kind of coping. Clean laundry, wine.”

— Nina Riggs

25. “That was grief, I say to myself. It makes us dark and a little crazy.”

— Nina Riggs

26. “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. Here.”

— Nina Riggs

27. “Also there was this – something we came to understand together much later: her desperately needing to still be my mom, my desperately needing to prove to her how much I didn’t need a mom.”

— Nina Riggs

28. “My mom’s death feels exactly like this wound on my chest,” I text her. “Sometimes I get confused about which pain I’m feeling.” “I know,” she says. “Me, too.”

— Nina Riggs

29. “Like a school of fish or a pride of lions or a murder of crows, a group of elephants is called a “memory.” A memory of elephants.”

— Nina Riggs

30. “It’s hard to say exactly how the pain shapes my days; it is as variable as the weather, as tomatoes, as a child. Sometimes it finds me with the first turn in bed; sometimes only after too long at a party; sometimes it is all that I am – my truest self – and other times I only recognize it on the faces and stoops of others enough to say its name. Pain – you are a cipher as well.”

— Nina Riggs

31. “With such frequent, common examples passing before our eyes, how can we possibly get rid of the thought of death; how can it not seem at every moment to be gripping us by the throat?”

— Nina Riggs

32. “I am reminded of an image... that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more – sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.”

— Nina Riggs

33. “We have to learn that what cannot be cured must be endured,” Montaigne also says.”

— Nina Riggs

34. “Everything is strange – so unlike anything we have done before – and everything, too, is exactly as we imagined.”

— Nina Riggs

35. “Dying provokes nearsightedness in the caregiver.”

— Nina Riggs

36. “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, not concerned about it or – still less – my unfinished garden.”

— Nina Riggs

37. “Just to sit with her and enjoy the quietness around her – the way so many children seem to love to do with their mothers without understanding how we disturb that quietness with our very presence.”

— Nina Riggs

38. “These are the things we all say at the end of book club now: I love you. Of course we do. Why haven’t we been saying that all along?”

— Nina Riggs

39. “You are fully entitled to slap the next person who tells you that God only gives us what we can handle.”

— Nina Riggs

40. “I don’t belong in bed, but I don’t fit in out in the world either.”

— Nina Riggs