Quotes from Claire Messud

The simplest and least flattering explanation was always the right one, I'd learned over the years. But

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

It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you'll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city. Or

brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton

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.

Never let the sun go down on an argument," she said. "Because one of us might die in the night," I said, as I'd replied since I was small. But this time, she laughed, a dry, sad laugh. "One of us just might, Mouse.

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself;

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.

My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced?

No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say "Fuck off" to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all.

There are the social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty... and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood's clouds in glory to live, ever after, in our earthly realm

We find hope where we can, and where we cannot, invent it.

You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and yous tart to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you've lost them, but because you know you need to take care...Beware darkness, isolation, the outdoors, unlocked windows, men you don't know. And then you realize too that even men you know, or thought you knew, might not be okay.

She, who had felt she saw so clearly that it hurt, had felt that the truth, crystalline, was, with Murray, granted her (though not through his help, or anything he did: but just by his presence; as though, indeed, he were but a part of her that had been lost, a magnificent platonic epiphany repeated, and daily repeated: this, surely, was love!), felt, now, that the weight of emotion lay like a veil, a fine mist.

All those years we'd been friends, since forever, we'd used the same words and perhaps meant different things--sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we'd never known it.

Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn't want to be reminded that it was fake.

I imagined that the building carried the sadness of the women who'd been trapped there...I didn't see them--there was no visible mass of ghosts peering out of the hollowed windows--but I couldn't help but feel they marked the territory.

I have believed in the value of knowledge and of truth. And I have believed that the quality of a life is not measured by money, celebrity, or material goods but by richness of mind, generosity of spirit, and by meaningful human relationships.

For real?' Cassie's eyes glittered, and it occurred to me that all along she'd expected me to stop us. She'd goaded and teased me, made out like I was a wimp; but she also relied on me to keep us safe.

We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true, or not true of me, but I've learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it burn.

It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that nobody we knew had ever really seen the building: it was the sort of thing you wished you'd done, without actually wishing to do it.

Don't plan it, don't overthink it, just let it happen, you've got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . .

Cassie could be affectionate and scornful at the same time, and I always felt that if I wasn't careful, the scorn might win out.

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.