Quotes from Claire Messud

It's hard to grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time.

but this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life's tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in flood: you can only take in, you can only grasp, so much.

It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

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.

there's a period of accommodation before you are formally and

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.

And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you've found the pot of gold, when you'd thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It's enough, for a time - maybe even for a long time - to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all.

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.

From the beginning, then, but briefly.

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.

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?

Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart's desires. Life, art, motherhood. Love and the great seductive promise that I wasn't nothing. That I could be seen for my unvarnished self, and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could, that indeed she must, leave a trace upon the world.

We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. 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 discovered I could hate her a bit, and because I didn't tell her so, because our friendship went along on this reduced, part-time scale that didn't allow for arguments, there was no noticeable change in our relationship.

Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the two types of people on opposite sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, where did the lunatics go? Where had they gone? Were they among us? Were they us?

he was playing on the climbing structure by himself—or "by his own," as the children sometimes charmingly put it.

You need to see everything else—everyone else—as expendable, as less than yourself.

MY MOTHER assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the "she moved to Tucson" sense, but in the sense that "we grew apart.

If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

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.

I was funny—ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless.

I'm forty-two years old—which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.

It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when people try to say things, they say them poorly, or obliquely, or they outright lie, sometimes because they're lying to you, but as often because they're lying to themselves. Sirena