Top 73 Claire Messud Quotes
#1. I always thought I'd live in Paris, Rome, Madrid - at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn't dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl's fantasy, a blanched almond of a fantasy. Today, even that is enough to clench my fists and curl my toes. In
Claire Messud
#2. How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.
Claire Messud
#3. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good?
Claire Messud
#4. The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.
Claire Messud
#5. It rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow,
Claire Messud
#8. As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.
Claire Messud
#9. I don't want to sleep,' my mother said. 'I want
for God's sake, I want to wake up.
Claire Messud
#10. If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.
Claire Messud
#11. Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible?
Claire Messud
#12. If you told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That's always the way.
Claire Messud
#13. Americans see everything too simply-a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question.
Claire Messud
#14. But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or lovable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter ingloriousness, there's no telling what I might do
Claire Messud
#15. That cheery, flimsy distraction from Death; or in a pinch Law & Order, because on some station or other, at any time of day or night, you can find it
Detective Benson! Detective Stabler! My long lost!
and no longer be alone.
Claire Messud
#16. Death and his zealous minions - dread, despair, disease - can find you anywhere at all, and the armor plate of youth will no longer protect you.
Claire Messud
#17. Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness?
Claire Messud
#18. I'm forty-two years old - which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.
Claire Messud
#19. That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.
Claire Messud
#20. And it explains much about me, too, about the limits of my experience, about the fact that the person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world. Nobody would know me from my own description of myself.
Claire Messud
#21. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.
Claire Messud
#22. So: now a new year, a new beginning. I've vowed not to complain. I'm too good at it, and need to practice other skills. I've also vowed to work very hard ...
Claire Messud
#23. What I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish,
Claire Messud
#24. To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value.
Claire Messud
#25. Who is he who walks always beside you? No-fucking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone.
Claire Messud
#26. I'm angry enough to set fire to a house just by looking at it ... I'm angry enough, at last, to stop being afraid of life, and angry enough ... before I die to fucking well live.
Claire Messud
#27. An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.'
Claire Messud
#28. Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.
Claire Messud
#29. Maybe, instead, I'll set the world on fire. I just might.
Claire Messud
#30. There is, I came to realize, what the mind wants and what the body wants. The mind can excite the body, but its desires can also be false; whereas the body, the animal, wants what it wants.
Claire Messud
#31. Its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized
a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle
then this only makes the pictures more mine.
Claire Messud
#32. I wish it hadn't happened; but what good does this do? I can wish it wouldn't happen again - but here too, if I'm wishing the impossible, it will do no good at all.
Claire Messud
#33. I was crazy. I was crazy in the way a child is crazy, in the way of someone who believes, with rash fervor, that life can be - that it will yet be, and most certainly - as you would wish it. How could I have been so foolish?
Claire Messud
#34. I wanted him to reassure me, and when I saw he wasn't going to, I thought, This is when the shit hits the fan.
Claire Messud
#35. An inchoate ball of ambition, Julius knew that he had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.
Claire Messud
#36. I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.
Claire Messud
#37. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.
Claire Messud
#38. There's a period of accommodation before you are formally and
Claire Messud
#39. Was suddenly aware, almost in a panic - a joyful panic - of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself.
Claire Messud
#40. It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm, my head upon his breast, I'd sensed his heart beating and for a moment hadn't been sure whether it was mine.
Claire Messud
#41. I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it.
Claire Messud
#42. He was playing on the climbing structure by himself - or "by his own," as the children sometimes charmingly put it.
Claire Messud
#43. Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.
Claire Messud
#44. My motivation, even in anticipated shame, lay always in others. You can take the woman out of the upstairs, but you can't take the upstairs out of her.
Claire Messud
#45. You wouldn't want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are.
Claire Messud
#46. I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.
Claire Messud
#47. Live, my dear Nora. Satisfy your hunger. There's food all around you, you know.' 'What kind of food, I'd like to know?' 'Ah'-he smiled- 'you must taste all things, actually to know if you like them.' And what good is that, I wanted to ask, if the most delicious fruit is forbidden?
Claire Messud
#48. This was the fall of 2004. The wider world was deeply fucked, and home also. Two American wars raging - bloodbaths each, bloodbath major and bloodbath minor, ugly, squirrelly hateful clandestine wars marked by betrayal, incompetence and corruption. Don't get me started.
Claire Messud
#49. As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned.
Claire Messud
#50. Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.
Claire Messud
#51. Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying
valiantly, fruitlessly
to eradicate.
Claire Messud
#52. A strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food ...
Claire Messud
#53. [S]he was my Muse, my alcoholic's bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.
Claire Messud
#54. The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole.
Claire Messud
#55. Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider's web, did not cry.
Claire Messud
#56. It was supposed to say "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say "such a good teacher/daughter/friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is F*** YOU ALL.
Claire Messud
#57. Who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all.
Claire Messud
#59. Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world.
Claire Messud
#60. It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.
Claire Messud
#61. I was funny
ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.
Claire Messud
#62. It was one of those moments when life's disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is useful to get that learned.
Claire Messud
#63. For so long I had eaten my greens and here - at last! - was my ice-cream sundae.
Claire Messud
#64. I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.
Claire Messud
#65. The simplest and least flattering explanation was always the right one, I'd learned over the years. But
Claire Messud
#66. Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparent inability to see the light. He would have to show them.
Claire Messud
#67. Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?),
Claire Messud
#68. Once aware of my isolation, I was afraid not of it but of its interruption.
Claire Messud
#69. The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.
Claire Messud
#70. When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren't alone.
Claire Messud
#71. I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.
Claire Messud
#72. I was aware of doing only a so-so job on the grown-up career front, but I didn't really care, because there were two big exam questions I wanted to be sure I answered fully: the question of art, and the question of love.
Claire Messud
#73. I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you're taught to eat your greens before you have dessert.
Claire Messud
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