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Book: The Burning Girl
Quotes of Book: The Burning Girl

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 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 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 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 Burning Girl
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 Burning Girl
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 . . .
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
MY MOTHER assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the "she moved to Tucson" sense, but in the sense that "we grew apart.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
Without it being said, I was treated as a kid with a bright future and Cassie, well, she wasn't necessarily not going to have one, but her path would be different from mine. Without anybody saying so outright, I was being told that my path was the more valuable. I got that from my parents, and from Mr. Cartwright when he chose me for speech team, and from my teachers when they patted me on the back and gave me good grades, and from my grandmother, who, when she asked me about Cassie at Thanksgiving and I told her we'd been drifting apart, caressed my cheek with her shiny hand that smelled of rosewater and said, "It's hard growing up, because each of us must follow our own star"-which was, of itself, pretty neutral, but then she added, "And some of us have brighter stars to follow than others, I'm afraid.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
But I did wonder what she did, on those afternoons-not just Fridays either, because on the days I had speech team, somebody else's mother or father dropped her at her door. It seemed like a lot of time to be alone. When I was by myself-and I loved being in my room on my own, reading on my bed or listening to music and staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars that my father had stuck on the ceiling when I was small-I could hear my mother moving around the house, the creaky boards upstairs or the faint murmur of the radio from the kitchen, and then I could smell dinner: the onions in the pan, or the whiff of meat cooking or the delicious pastry scent of a baking tart. Even when I was alone, I liked to know that I wasn't really entirely alone; but that wasn't how it was for Cassie.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
My mother was annoyed with me throughout their visit-ostensibly because I wasn't being a good enough hostess to the cousins, but really because she found it overwhelming to have so many members of my father's family staying; but they were all so good-natured that she couldn't show it, or even allow that she was mildly irritable. The cousins were there on my father's account, and she wanted very much to be a good enough person not to be annoyed, because he himself was that sort of good person, and put up with my mother's family without ever, apparently, losing his temper.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
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.
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Claire Messud _ The Burning Girl
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.
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