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5a7f046
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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a20d275
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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70ad08b
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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 sp..
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Claire Messud |
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d8413f3
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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0fa176a
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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1a3a229
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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. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to..
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Claire Messud |
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d55adc3
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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a87f5ef
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Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered ..
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Claire Messud |
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beda79d
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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.
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life
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Claire Messud |
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e482cec
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Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.
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Claire Messud |
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8a6b6b5
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Who is he who walks always beside you? No-fucking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone.
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Claire Messud |
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9df517d
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Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
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Claire Messud |
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eda1be6
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The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read--Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant's Critique of Judgment--but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in som..
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Claire Messud |
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a5103d3
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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 o..
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Claire Messud |
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f58b8fd
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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ddd93fe
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How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that. 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 my 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 whe..
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Claire Messud |
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544f3e2
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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."
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Claire Messud |
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305f68d
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Once aware of my isolation, I was afraid not of it but of its interruption.
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Claire Messud |
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fd84e8e
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But we're lost in a world of appearances now.
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Claire Messud |
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69de2ac
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That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.
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Claire Messud |
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8e142ef
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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?
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Claire Messud |
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fae33a1
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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
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Claire Messud |
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f98a4b1
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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874f6bb
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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?
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Claire Messud |
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b06a0db
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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 [...]"
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Claire Messud |
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62307ea
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When you're a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you're better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/ biology/ French test and say, "Oh my God, it's going to be such a disaster! I'm so scared!" and you put ..
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Claire Messud |
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44946e5
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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58f2428
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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 ..
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daughters
anger
mothers
women-s-roles
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Claire Messud - The Woman Upstairs |
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8904093
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Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness?
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Claire Messud |
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9fb45f9
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With someone you've always known and have loved without thinking, there's the strangeness of knowing everything and nothing about them at the same time.
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Claire Messud |
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0c80b90
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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dd4b490
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It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Lili's world was not so different from my dioramas, or even from Sirena's installations: you took a tiny portion of the earth and made it yours, but really what you wanted was for someone else -- ideally, a grown-up, because a grown-up matters, has authority, but is also not the same as you -- to come and see, to get it, and thereby, somehow, to get and all of this, surely so that you might ..
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Claire Messud |
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3317893
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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1ce35ee
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Her self, then, was represented in her books.
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Claire Messud |
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a79ae2d
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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25b2d96
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I wish it hadn't happened; but what good does this do? I can wish it wouldn't happen again - but here too, if I'm wishing the impossible, it will do no good at all.
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Claire Messud |
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5445e92
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For so long I had eaten my greens and here - at last! - was my ice-cream sundae.
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Claire Messud |
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d87160e
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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?),
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Claire Messud |
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9d18d74
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An inchoate mass 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.
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Claire Messud |
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63e7dc6
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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 for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these ..
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Claire Messud |
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6403178
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Don't ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast breathing skin, will insist otherwise.
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Claire Messud |
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751ff26
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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788c813
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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d6cf52d
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It's a different story depending on where you start: who's good, who's bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren't anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward.
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Claire Messud |