Claire messud Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Claire Messud
Quotes of Author: Claire Messud

Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid."
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Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs
But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive.
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Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs
We wouldn't be proper children if we didn't disregard our parents' most vital instruction.
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Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs
Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because 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 the more mine.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
But we don't really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it's our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we acknowledge the artifice, we accept that we've made a world that excludes what we ignore. Like gods, we invent a world that makes sense.
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Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs
Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren't really feeling what you're feeling, it doesn't make the feeling go away.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn't visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from the church to the town square, no problem, but you don't know where to get ice cream or a decent sandwich.
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Claire Messud _ The Emperor's Children
I measure my life out in books." "You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?
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Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs
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. 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, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
What would it be like to have been locked up in one of those cells for weeks or months or even years, only to discover that you'd never really been a lunatic at all, and could just as easily – if only the world had been a bit different – have been home in your bedroom all along? That would mean that you couldn't be sure about things. 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?
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Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs
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.
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Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs
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.
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