Lizzy

“I did not yet know that, contrary to youth's sense of itself as tolerant, freethinking, and egalitarian, it is more often stubbornly critical and judgmental, priggish and snobbish. I would find these faults much later (glaring) in my son and daughter and their friends. But at that age myself, I did not see how we truly were, nor did I put together that these faults were often worst in those with the strongest political opinions.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“She said, "I wish I had been born poor." ("I wish I'd been born an Indian" - Robert Kennedy.) The ideal would have been to be born poor and black. But the counterculture was full of people in the grip of the same fantasy, with some - from street fighters to rock stars to flower children - even starting to believe they were black.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“[Ann] didn't approve of the contributions her parents made to large cultural institutions like the Lincoln Center...The Draytons were also big givers to programs to save American wildlife and wilderness. "Because animals and trees are more important than people?" their daughter fumed. To be fair, her parents did, through their church, give to Connecticut's poor. But Ann was not appeased, not when "they could give so much more." When I learned that what the Draytons did give altogether to various charities each year amounted to many times the cost of our entire college tuition, I was speechless. So they were sharing their wealth, weren't they, in a pretty big way? So they couldn't really be called bloodsucking parasites?

Ann set me straight. "Most of that money is tax deductible, don't forget. Do you think they would give a penny if it weren't?" I didn't know. But from the way Ann talked, you would have through her mother had stolen the money she spent on clothes and antiques from welfare mothers and the North Vietnamese.”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind

“But even before she got to college, Ann's thinking had become to change. She could no longer see herself working for the system. The system was corrupt through and through, she said, and you could not be a part of it without becoming corrupt yourself. So it was goodbye to that dream, as it was goodbye to "Dooley" and goodbye to horses. Oh, she would always love horses, she said, but equestrianism was on that growing list of things (along with tennis, weddings, monogamy, and cocktail parties) that she now called bourgeois affectations. (Sometimes she said, "That is such a B.A.," for short.)”
― Sigrid Núñez, The Last of Her Kind