The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“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.” (What Are You Going Through Quotes)
Sigrid Nunez
What Are You Going Through
“And what the movie makes clear is that, if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind.”
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
“Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.”
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?”
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
“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
“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
“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.”
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
“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.”
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Woman 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
“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
