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Book: The Woman Upstairs
Quotes of Book: The Woman Upstairs
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  1. Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs

    But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive.
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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs

    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
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  9. Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs

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

    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. Sirena,
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  11. Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs

    I'm forty-two years old-which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.
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  12. Claire Messud _ The Woman Upstairs

    I was funny-ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless.
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