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1035ba7
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I don't want to sleep,' my mother said. 'I want -- for God's sake, I want to wake up.
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Claire Messud |
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9c90824
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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0676f64
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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ce5f0b2
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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. I could film my anger and sell it, I could do some unmasking of my own, beat the fuckers at their own game, and on the way I could become the best-known fucking artist in America, out of sheer spite. Yo..
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Claire Messud |
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8688d40
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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faf6723
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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 crim..
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Claire Messud |
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460396e
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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."
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reading
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Claire Messud |
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65726b1
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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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0af1602
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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4fe8e11
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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f07cc51
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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...
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Claire Messud |
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5c98f71
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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...which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books...that conjured for her an earlier, passionately ..
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Claire Messud |
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c74e6a6
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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.
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Claire Messud - The Woman Upstairs |
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13f036d
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Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are.
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Claire Messud |
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9c5cc17
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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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fbcd11e
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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?
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Claire Messud |
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b7db2a9
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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e87bd32
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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d87e3ac
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it took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark.
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Claire Messud |
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1642995
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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16b94f3
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You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.
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Claire Messud |
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d4cea2b
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a strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food....
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Claire Messud |
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98f5d92
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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,
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Claire Messud |
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dc90357
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Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality. Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible?
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Claire Messud |
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8ea9f6a
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Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider's web, did not cry.
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Claire Messud |
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f18a4d3
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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7dfb3e1
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All our stores are more or less made up, after all.
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Claire Messud |
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f63ce99
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How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good?
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Claire Messud |
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2594370
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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 memory, and your ideal place becomes some strange imaginary concoction of all you've left behind at every stop.
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migration
nostalgia
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Claire Messud |
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94c7046
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was suddenly aware, almost in a panic--a joyful panic--of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself.
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Claire Messud |
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8fb6c30
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it rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow,
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Claire Messud |
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3074e86
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I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic - a joyful panic - of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My
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Claire Messud |
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276756e
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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787d6dc
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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1523d63
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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a1f7837
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That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.
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Claire Messud |
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19a9ae8
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S]he was my Muse, my alcoholic's bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.
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Claire Messud |
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164fcfd
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He said that's what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen.
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Claire Messud |
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88025a4
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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; wo..
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obsession
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Claire Messud |
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fbc3810
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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4506d8b
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there's a period of accommodation before you are formally and
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Claire Messud |
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14912ea
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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.
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Claire Messud |
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8fd38a4
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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?
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Claire Messud |
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a1a5b61
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I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.
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vocation
job
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Claire Messud |