What Are You Going Through (2021)
Sigrid Nunez
rating good
type fiction quotes e-book
2021/01/20 The musings of a woman spending time with her terminally-ill friend in her last days.
- Perhaps quoting another writer, translated in French: “Before man, the forest; after him, the desert.”
- “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.”
- “The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old.”
- “...the boundless capacity of the human mind for self-delusion...”
- “Youth burdened with full knowledge of just how sad and painful aging is I would not call youth at all.”
- “The wonder of certain coincidences.”
- “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.“
- “...I found myself a breath away from believing that everything was as it should be. See the moon. Count the stars. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end (Joyce). Infinitely rich, infinitely beautiful. Everything was going to be all right.”
- “The literal meaning of life is whatever you do that stops you from killing yourself.” (Camus)