Top 60 Sigrid Nunez Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.”

— Sigrid Nunez

3. “You can’t hurry love, as the song goes. You can’t hurry grief either.”

— Sigrid Nunez

4. “Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.”

— Sigrid Nunez

5. “If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.”

— Sigrid Nunez

6. “When people are very young they see animals as equals, even as kin. That humans are different, unique and superior to all other species – this they have to be taught.”

— Sigrid Nunez

7. “Wouldn’t it be easier if we just named all the cats Password?”

— Sigrid Nunez

8. “You write a thing down because you’re hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion.”

— Sigrid Nunez

9. “No writing is ever wasted, you used to say. Even if something doesn’t work out and you end up throwing it away, as a writer you always learn something. Here.”

— Sigrid Nunez

10. “The dead dwell in the conditional, tense of the unreal. But there is also the extraordinary sense that you have become omniscient, that nothing we do or think or feel can be kept from you. The extraordinary sense that you are reading these words, that you know what they’ll say even before I write them.”

— Sigrid Nunez

11. “Once again I come upon his famous definition of love: two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other.”

— Sigrid Nunez

12. “What we miss – what we lose and what we mourn – isn’t it this that makes us who, deep down, we truly are. To say nothing of what we wanted in life but never got to have.”

— Sigrid Nunez

13. “They don’t commit suicide. They don’t weep. But they can and do fall to pieces. They can and do have their hearts broken. They can and do lose their minds.”

— Sigrid Nunez

14. “Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?”

— Sigrid Nunez

15. “Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he’d gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn’t become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I’m writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.”

— Sigrid Nunez

16. “There’s a certain type of person who, having read this far, is anxiously wondering: Does something bad happen to the dog?”

— Sigrid Nunez

17. “Rather than, say, Toni Morrison, who called basing a character on a real person an infringement of copyright. A person owns his life, she says. It’s not for another to use it for fiction.”

— Sigrid Nunez

18. “Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I’ll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.”

— Sigrid Nunez

19. “Because it’s all about the rhythm, you said. Good sentences start with a beat.”

— Sigrid Nunez

20. “I know this is all moronically anthropomorphic, but sometimes that is the form love takes.”

— Sigrid Nunez

21. “Another question: why do people often find animal suffering harder to accept than the suffering of other human beings?”

— Sigrid Nunez

22. “That there could be something in the world that a woman could want more than children has been viewed as unacceptable. Things may be marginally different now, but, even if there is something she wants more than children, that is no reason for a woman to remain childless. Any normal woman, it is understood, wants – and should want – both.”

— Sigrid Nunez

23. “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

24. “Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”

— Sigrid Nunez

25. “A pause here to confess, not without shame: I never heard the news that you’d fallen in love without experiencing a pang, nor could I suppress a surge of joy each time I heard that you were breaking up with someone.”

— Sigrid Nunez

26. “He is convinced – and what immigrant isn’t? – that all Americans are crazy.”

— Sigrid Nunez

27. “Graffiti on Philosophy Hall: The examined life ain’t worth it either.”

— Sigrid Nunez

28. “Be kind, because everyone you meet is going through a struggle.”

— Sigrid Nunez

29. “It’s not uncommon to wish to have known what a person you’ve come to love was like before you met them. It hurts, almost, not to have known what a beloved was like as a child. I have felt this way about every man I’ve ever been in love with, and about many close friends as well, and now it’s how I feel about Apollo.”

— Sigrid Nunez

30. “It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about – also mostly college students – the internet barely exists.”

— Sigrid Nunez

31. “I’ve known plenty of women who brace themselves whenever they leave the house, even a few who try to avoid leaving the house. Of course, a woman has only to wait until she’s a certain age, when she becomes invisible, and – problem solved.”

— Sigrid Nunez

32. “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

33. “He has to forget you. He has to forget you and fall in love with me. That’s what has to happen.”

— Sigrid Nunez

34. “The poet Rilke once reported seeing a dying dog give its mistress a look full of reproach. Later, he gave this experience to the narrator of a novel: He was convinced I could have prevented it. It was now clear that he had always overrated me. And there was no time left to explain it to him. He continued to gaze at me, surprised and solitary, until it was over.”

— Sigrid Nunez

35. “In a book I am reading the author talks about word people versus fist people. As if words could not also be fists. Aren’t often fists.”

— Sigrid Nunez

36. “Idyllic is how Kundera describes human relationships with animals. Idyllic because animals were not expelled with us from Paradise. There they remain, untroubled by such complications as the separation of body and soul, and it’s through our love and friendship with them that we are able to reconnect to Paradise, albeit by just a thread.”

— Sigrid Nunez

37. “I like that the Aborigines say dogs make people human.”

— Sigrid Nunez

38. “I don’t want to talk about you, or to hear others talk about you. It’s a cliche, of course: we talk about the dead in order to remember them, in order to keep them, in the only way we can, alive. But I have found that the more people say about you, for example those who spoke at the memorial – people who loved you, people who knew you well, people who were very good with words – the further you seem to slip away, the more like a hologram you become.”

— Sigrid Nunez

39. “When did she plant the roses. In full magnificent bloom now, the red and the white. A fragrance to make you go, Aaah. I think how much they must have pleased her, year after year, and made her proud. And it’s not the thought that she must miss them, but that she’s no longer capable of missing them, that makes me sad.”

— Sigrid Nunez

40. “The sound of a pen scratching in the night is a holy sound.”

— Sigrid Nunez

41. “Who doesn’t know that the dog is the epitome of devotion? But it’s this devotion to humans, so instinctual that it’s given freely even to persons who are unworthy of it, that has made me prefer cats. Give me a pet that can get along without me.”

— Sigrid Nunez

42. “It would undo me, I think, to glimpse some familiar piece of clothing, or a certain book or photograph, or to catch a hint of your smell. And I don’t want to be undone like that, oh my God, not with your widow standing by.”

— Sigrid Nunez

43. “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

44. “I once heard a stranger in agitated conversation with her pug: And I suppose it’s all my fault again, isn’t it? At which, I swear, the dog rolled its eyes.”

— Sigrid Nunez

45. “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

46. “What do dogs think when they see someone cry? Bred to be comforters, they comfort us. But how puzzling human unhappiness must be to them. We who can fill our dishes any time and with as much food as we like, who can go outside whenever we wish, and run free – we who have no master constantly needling to be pleased, or obeyed.”

— Sigrid Nunez

47. “The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.”

— Sigrid Nunez

48. “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

49. “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

50. “When I ask him why he thinks I should have known that he was writing about himself, he looks puzzled and says, Who else would I be writing about?”

— Sigrid Nunez