Claire Dederer Quotes & Sayings

Jonathan's voice was quiet now. "Thank you for sharing this evening with me. In yoga, we say 'Namaste,' which means 'I bow to the divine in you.'" He bowed his dork-knobbed head and said, "Namaste." We bowed back and mumbled, "Namaste." On my tongue, the new word felt as though it contained its own foreign spice. — Claire Dederer

No matter where you go in the world, a German will have beaten you there, clad in a sweaty black T-shirt and a smug expression. — Claire Dederer

I had discovered something; there was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life. — Claire Dederer

What if the opposite of good wasn't bad? What if the opposite of good was real? — Claire Dederer

I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: "Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling."
Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, "Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again."
Fear. I hadn't even known it was there. — Claire Dederer

Reality is an easy commodity in the Front Range. There's weather, and there are animals that are thinking about eating you, and there's all that beauty. It sort of whomps you on the head. It's strange that we use the word "unreal" to describe beauty-it's my experience that beauty drags us by the hair into the real. — Claire Dederer

Yoga is just gymnastics for uncoordinated people. — Claire Dederer

Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere. — Claire Dederer

Our anxieties were driving us to become other people - he was Earner; I was
Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play. — Claire Dederer