Messud Claire Quotes & Sayings

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

The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation. — Claire Messud

For so long I had eaten my greens and here - at last! - was my ice-cream sundae. — Claire Messud

It all came down to entitlement, and one's sense of it. 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 - of this he was ever more decided, with a flamelike conviction. But he was already thirty, and the question was how? — Claire Messud

It rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow, — Claire Messud

A strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food ... — Claire Messud

We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think my goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be? — Claire Messud

I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it. — Claire Messud

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

This was the fall of 2004. The wider world was deeply fucked, and home also. Two American wars raging - bloodbaths each, bloodbath major and bloodbath minor, ugly, squirrelly hateful clandestine wars marked by betrayal, incompetence and corruption. Don't get me started. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

But the shadow settled on them, obliquely, and was shuffled off only when Danielle rose to put on music, a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonies wavering in the small room, as if to remind them both that beauty and loss were inseparably entwined. — Claire Messud

I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you're taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. — Claire Messud

I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck. I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and underlinings they are irreplaceable; but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish. ~ Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Child. — Leah Price

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? — Claire Messud

As any of us approaches middle age, we inevitably come up against our limitations: the realization that certain dearly-held fantasies may not be realized; that circumstances have thwarted us; that even with intention and will we may not be able to set our ship back on the course we'd planned. — Claire Messud

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

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. — Claire Messud

I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc. — Claire Messud

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 — Claire Messud

That cheery, flimsy distraction from Death; or in a pinch Law & Order, because on some station or other, at any time of day or night, you can find it
Detective Benson! Detective Stabler! My long lost!
and no longer be alone. — Claire Messud

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

You could control what you did, if you wanted to....Was it efficient? Was it productive? ...So many people didn't bother -- a kind of stupidity...a lack of vision, or purpose. Anyone who said they just woke up and found themselves in the place they'd always wanted to be was lying; and anyone who believed such a person was a fool. It was all a matter of will. — Claire Messud

I'm angry enough to set fire to a house just by looking at it ... I'm angry enough, at last, to stop being afraid of life, and angry enough ... before I die to fucking well live. — Claire Messud

And it explains much about me, too, about the limits of my experience, about the fact that the person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world. Nobody would know me from my own description of myself. — Claire Messud

How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels. — Amy Waldman

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. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

The novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy ,wonder, anticipation-these are things these friends gave to her and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds to the immensity of what she has lost. It doesn't matter in a way whether all these emotions were the result of real interactions or of fantasy, she experienced them fully. And in losing them, has lost happiness. — Claire Messud

Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through. — Claire Messud

I don't want to sleep,' my mother said. 'I want
for God's sake, I want to wake up. — Claire Messud

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have
that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?), — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

Once aware of my isolation, I was afraid not of it but of its interruption. — Claire Messud

I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman. — 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

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, — Claire Messud

As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

I was so happy it was like a food, like I'd been stuffed with it, a foie gras goose of happiness; happy enough to know, fully, that I was happy, and foolishly, for one second, to dare the thought: "Imagine - imagine if each Saturday morning could be like this," and in the middle of the singing, I blushed, not even looking at her, because even just having it I knew there was something wrong about the thought. Another boundary crossing - an acknowledgment to myself, so fleeting but so dangerous, of how hungry I was. — 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

Service is one of life's great joys. It's a privilege to be in service. It's a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. As long as you give yourself to it. You don't need to worry about anything but doing that job well, and the satisfaction, when you do, is very beautiful. — Claire Messud

What I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, — Claire Messud

I was aware of doing only a so-so job on the grown-up career front, but I didn't really care, because there were two big exam questions I wanted to be sure I answered fully: the question of art, and the question of love. — Claire Messud

Death and his zealous minions - dread, despair, disease - can find you anywhere at all, and the armor plate of youth will no longer protect you. — Claire Messud

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? — Claire Messud

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me. — Claire Messud

And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd catch myself thinking about her as alive; and would suddenly remember, an admonitory finger of grief upon my breast, that she was gone. — Claire Messud

Was suddenly aware, almost in a panic - a joyful panic - of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. — Claire Messud

I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. — 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

I was funny
ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense. — Claire Messud

There's a period of accommodation before you are formally and — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole. — Claire Messud

The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art. — Claire Messud

Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person. — Claire Messud

To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value. — Claire Messud

I'm a good girl. I'm a nice girl. I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and brother's shit and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over forty fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died,after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father ever day on the telephone
every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a big muggy too? 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. — Claire Messud

The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its lobby, for one thing, was little more than a wide corridor, with two drably upholstered wing chairs propped against a wall and, between them, a glass table upon which rested an elaborate but unaesthetic arrangement of silk flowers. The light in the corridor was greenish, dim and lavatorial, barely illuminating the shallowly carved figures that marched, in pseudo-Egyptian fashion, along the pink stone tiles as far as the elevator. The floor, incongruously, was of a black and white parquet, upon which all but the softest slippers echoed ominously. And the elevator itself - paneled, with brass fixtures and a single tiny red velvet stool, presumably for its operator's comfort - seemed again of a different, though no less ancient, era. — Claire Messud

Her self, then, was represented in her books. — Claire Messud

Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness? — Claire Messud

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying
valiantly, fruitlessly
to eradicate. — Claire Messud

How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that. — Claire Messud

I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would hurt. But you can't pretend they didn't need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn't necessarily have admitted it - except Reza - but you can't tell me they didn't love me. The heart knows. The body knows. When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time passed differently; words or gestures meant more than themselves. If you've never had this experience-but who has not been visited by love, laughing?-then you can't understand. And if you have, you don't need me to say another word. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

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

So: now a new year, a new beginning. I've vowed not to complain. I'm too good at it, and need to practice other skills. I've also vowed to work very hard ... — Claire Messud

But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life. — Claire Messud

It was one of those moments when life's disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is useful to get that learned. — Claire Messud

I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head
in my memory, in my thoughts
was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes, shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

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

That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way. — Claire Messud

From the beginning, then, but briefly. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

Geniuses have the shortest biographies. — Claire Messud

An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.' — Claire Messud

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

Its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized
a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle
then this only makes the pictures more mine. — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

Who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all. — Claire Messud

She wanted to remind him, whether his family was there or not. She wanted. And wanted. And endured in her wanting: the damp seat, the dry chicken, more champagne, the headache the champagne brought, the midges, the chat, his failure, no refusal, to look, look at me, I caused a thunderstorm with my passion and I sit here shaking under my skin and you don't notice because you're trying so hard not to notice, but all the people at the table there are really only you and me and you know it, the air is charged with it, it's a heat, a hot wind, and Marina and Seely are a sham next to it, Annabel ceases to exist, is simply obliterated in the gale of it, this isn't a fantasy, not my imagination, I can tell by the way you lift your fork, by the set of your jaw, by that sixth cigarette you are smoking me, or would if you could; but how long can we sustain it, how long till eruption, till the storm returns again and they can all see what it is, what it really is? — Claire Messud

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 — Claire Messud

I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow. — Claire Messud

I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough
or I misunderstood what strength was. — Claire Messud

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

Who is he who walks always beside you? No-fucking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone. — Claire Messud

Maybe, instead, I'll set the world on fire. I just might. — Claire Messud

Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is? — Claire Messud

I was crazy. I was crazy in the way a child is crazy, in the way of someone who believes, with rash fervor, that life can be - that it will yet be, and most certainly - as you would wish it. How could I have been so foolish? — Claire Messud

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. — Claire Messud

But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or lovable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter ingloriousness, there's no telling what I might do — Claire Messud