Claire Messud The Woman Upstairs Quotes & Sayings

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

We're always upstairs. We're not the madwomen in the attic
they get lots of play, one way or another. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. 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. — Claire Messud

When you are 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." It's a small thing, you might think, and maybe it depends on your temperament, maybe for some people it's a small thing, but for me [ ... ] — Claire Messud

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. It's a small thing, you might think; and maybe it depends upon your temperament; maybe for some people it's a small thing. But for me, in that cul-de-sac outside Aunt Baby's, with my father and aunt done dissecting death and shuffling off to bed behind the crimson farmhouse door, preparing for morning mass as blameless as lambs and as lifeless as the slaughtered - I felt forsaken by hope. I felt I'd been seen, and seen clearly, and discarded, dropped back into the undiscriminated pile like a shell upon the shore. — Claire Messud