#the vulnerables

[dk-thrive]

Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. [...] I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey.

— Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023) (via Alive on All Channels)

[girlbloggerinterrupted222]

“what do you wanna be when you grow up??”

dead ❤️

[woundgallery]

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

[whisperthatruns]

"It was an uncertain spring." I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I'd looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. [...] I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey.

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)

[whoismims]

“The part of us that wants to be married and have a family is the part that wants to be normal, like other people, set on the path we were raised to believe was the right path—not just to happiness, but to respectability, acceptance, community. The part of us that wants love-potion-strength romance is the part that wants to go mad.”

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

[lazyydaisyyy]

By day I may have been so forgetful that I couldn't recall what I'd had for breakfast, but in the dark hours of the night I was a memory genius. I could recall every regrettable moment of my life. Every mistake I'd ever made, every humiliation, every failure, every sin, every harm I'd ever caused another person, deliberately or by accident, every bad or stupid thing I'd ever said or done.

Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables

[woundgallery]

from The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez