Quotes from Claire Messud

Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider's web, did not cry.

I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.

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.

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.

I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic – a joyful panic – of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My

I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.

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.

Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible?

When you're the Woman Upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.

That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.

I'm a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.

Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.

Isn't it funny," she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, "that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much—and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I've never had a harder time." (Except, she said "time-e.") "I guess I didn't realize it was

Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are.

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.

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 FUCK YOU ALL.

S]he was my Muse, my alcoholic's bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.

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.

But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.

He said that's what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen.

He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I've come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood.

and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing.

But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.

It is what you haven't done that will torment you