14562b0
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I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.
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Claire Messud |
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Maybe, instead, I'll set the world on fire. I just might.
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Claire Messud |
22e14c8
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Have you ever asked yourself whether you'd rather fly or be invisible?
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Claire Messud |
5fd7683
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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.
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Claire Messud |
0e03076
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would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to think I wouldn't have rebuffed her, but it's possible that I would have. It's possible that I would have felt the need to exercise the power if I'd had it. But she didn't grant me the opportunity
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Claire Messud |
f938d1c
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Isn't it funny," she said, stroking with an inky finger the beads of condensation on her glass of white wine, "that year was such an unhappy one, for me. Remember poor Reza? And Skandar away so much--and that weather. Do you remember, Nora? I've never had a harder time." (Except, she said "time-e.") "I guess I didn't realize it was"
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Claire Messud |
dcb944d
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The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its lobby, for one thing, was little more than a wide corridor, with two drably upholstered wing chairs propped against a wall and, between them, a glass table upon which rested an elaborate but unaesthetic arrangement of silk flowers. The light in..
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Claire Messud |
9304f83
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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."
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humour
women
strength
humourosly-inspirational
stress
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Claire Messud |
562b95b
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An inchoate ball 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 |
838a6d6
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From anywhere: where once he had feared that this immense city would set him adrift, a spinning atom in the ether, and where once he had seen in this the ultimate terror of insignificance, he now, and suddenly, and so clearly, saw that his fate had led him here. His fate had taken him off two trains this morning, had raised him to the surface at Whitehall Street, had shown him the spinning atoms, unraveling, the end of life, all of them peo..
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Claire Messud |
bfaed27
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and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing.
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Claire Messud |
489ab67
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Americans see everything too simply-a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question.
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Claire Messud |
6a3d4aa
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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; 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 tha..
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Claire Messud |
021715f
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And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you've found the pot of gold, when you'd thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It's enough, for a time - maybe even for a long time - to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all.
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Claire Messud |
c972ba0
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From the beginning, then, but briefly.
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Claire Messud |
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Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart's desires. Life, art, motherhood. Love and the great seductive promise that I wasn't nothing. That I could be seen for my unvarnished self, and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could, that indeed she must, leave a trace upon the world.
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Claire Messud |
2e9c71b
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The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained,
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Claire Messud |
f58723d
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I discovered I could hate her a bit, and because I didn't tell her so, because our friendship went along on this reduced, part-time scale that didn't allow for arguments, there was no noticeable change in our relationship.
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Claire Messud |
dd2f498
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He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I've come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, ..
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Claire Messud |
5c0eecd
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But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.
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Claire Messud |
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It's hard to grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time.
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Claire Messud |
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but this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life's tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in flood: you can only take in, you can only grasp, so much.
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Claire Messud |
a07159d
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But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive.
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Claire Messud |
975fe2f
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Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid.
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Claire Messud |
105b178
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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.
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Claire Messud |
f11fcfc
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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 |
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brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton
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Claire Messud |
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I'm a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.
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Claire Messud |
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You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and yous tart to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you've lost them, but because you know you need to take care...Beware darkness, isolation, the outdoors, unlocked windows, men you don't know. And then you realize too that even men you know, or thought you knew, might not be okay.
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Claire Messud |
c78d468
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All those years we'd been friends, since forever, we'd used the same words and perhaps meant different things--sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we'd never known it.
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Claire Messud |
e4bd517
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Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn't want to be reminded that it was fake.
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Claire Messud |
b4598ee
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There are social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty...and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood's clouds of glory to live, ever after, in our earthly realm.
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Claire Messud |
3727e5c
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I imagined that the building carried the sadness of the women who'd been trapped there...I didn't see them--there was no visible mass of ghosts peering out of the hollowed windows--but I couldn't help but feel they marked the territory.
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Claire Messud |
ea8e774
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For real?' Cassie's eyes glittered, and it occurred to me that all along she'd expected me to stop us. She'd goaded and teased me, made out like I was a wimp; but she also relied on me to keep us safe.
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Claire Messud |
9278877
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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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Claire Messud |
537ab34
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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 |
3a32424
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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 out of hiding.
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Claire Messud |
6f91354
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Americans see everything too simply--a good guy, a bad guy, does he have a white hat or a black hat? But it's the wrong question.
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Claire Messud |
3832a1f
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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 yo..
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Claire Messud |
aa303f6
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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 ann..
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Claire Messud |
f797e4d
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he was playing on the climbing structure by himself--or "by his own," as the children sometimes charmingly put it."
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Claire Messud |
3d714ac
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I'm forty-two years old--which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.
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Claire Messud |
abeb8a0
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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 mov..
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Claire Messud |
e9ba65b
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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 grand..
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Claire Messud |