Home > Author > Nell Freudenberger
1 " ... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall. "
― Nell Freudenberger , The Dissident
2 " He didn't understand how sadness came so easily to people. For him it was like a pile of rocks that had to be moved one at a time. Just thinking about it made him tired. "
3 " Once again she had the disorientating feeling that her past was still happening, unfolding in a parallel stream right alongside her present. "
― Nell Freudenberger , The Newlyweds
4 " I had an uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself had evaporated-not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That's the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated. "
― Nell Freudenberger , Lost and Wanted
5 " It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did. "
6 " Men she thought, could make a clean break with a woman, could leave in the way Parveen's husband had. Or could even be left, like George and determine to make a life another way. It was women who longed to retain ties and connections, to mix things up in complicated ways. "
7 " People lived their lives, carelessly dropping information as if it were trash. The writer moved behind them like a ragpicker. She cleaned and separated their garbage, culled and collected it. "
8 " We now know that our universe is almost certainly 13.77 billion years old, and that it expanded more than a trillion trillion times in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its life. "
9 " Years had passed, but we were still arguing about the same stuff. These patterns repeat themselves, with parents and children—that’s another reason I went to India. If I was going to have a family, I wanted it to be totally different from the one I’d had. "
10 " Fariq took the phone without asking and redialed the number, as if her difficulty might be the result of general female incompetence "
11 " But Amina couldn’t stand to look. It wasn’t that George was old but that he felt sorry for himself that drove her crazy. If her father was Thunder, then George was Smoke—and how could you argue with someone who began to disappear as soon as you opened your mouth? "
12 " She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the "
13 " it was something harder to describe than that. We were on each other’s side in a way that felt permanent, and so it hurt more than it might have otherwise, when she decided to shut me out. "
14 " She nodded, concealing her emotion because she thought Kim might try to hug her again, and she was never going to get used to the casual frequency of American hugging. "
15 " American English was different from the language she’d learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes. "
16 " I’ve never worked on quantum entanglement, which Einstein once dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” It’s a real phenomenon, though, one that has less to do with communication than with a shared history that causes a pair of particles, even once they’ve been permanently separated, to behave as if they knew what each other was thinking. "
17 " Charlie and I both felt very adult that last year of college, very experienced: I think we believed that what we'd achieved academically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it. "
18 " I read this article about how you can have anything going on in your head, as long as it doesn't manifest itself. Like a reflection.' I waited for my sister to expand on that, but she remained quiet. 'LIke a reflection that's different from what's doing the reflecting,' I suggested. "
19 " Physicists know that if you and I are sitting in a room together, you exert a gravitational force on me. It's almost nothing-I can't feel it-but it's the same force that binds our planet to our star. "
20 " Why would some people attracted to what is unfamiliar and others tat what they knew. She thought It may to do how comfortable you are in your own life, how well you though you belong "
