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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6e02ea4 | Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; | Claire Messud | ||
| 9e90d69 | We're the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who we are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true, or n.. | Claire Messud | ||
| 82a744a | My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced? | Claire Messud | ||
| a07ae2b | No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say "Fuck off" to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all." | Claire Messud | ||
| 91cc17b | 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 . . . | Claire Messud | ||
| 6ba25d2 | It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way. | Claire Messud | ||
| b3630b1 | In a Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather "unlikable" protagonist, Nora, who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, "I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim." And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn't like what .. | Roxane Gay | ||
| 492122c | 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. | Claire Messud | ||
| feb06c8 | But you see, everyone has a part to play. In this theater, I'm a daughter and a sister and a mother--never an artist. I could be, I don't know, Luc Tuymans, and it would mean nothing to them. They allow no room for anything but my duty. | Claire Messud | ||
| fa594c6 | 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, | Claire Messud | ||
| eda3095 | The simplest and least flattering explanation was always the right one, I'd learned over the years. But | Claire Messud | ||
| 7c83365 | 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 | Claire Messud | ||
| 8d6a1aa | 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." | Claire Messud | ||
| f19496d | 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." | Claire Messud | ||
| 66919b7 | 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 .. | Claire Messud | ||
| d683ae4 | 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'r.. | Claire Messud | ||
| d0e8409 | I measure my life out in books." "You should be measuring your life by living. Correction: you shouldn't be measuring your life. What's the point?" | Claire Messud | ||
| b0ac773 | 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. | Claire Messud | ||
| 7933648 | 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. | Claire Messud | ||
| 0209d03 | 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. | Claire Messud | ||
| a73843d | 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. | Claire Messud | ||
| a0ef3b5 | We wouldn't be proper children if we didn't disregard our parents' most vital instruction. | Claire Messud | ||
| bbb8e10 | platform would look, well, abandoned. Not a | David Baldacci | ||
| f8aad4c | The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world. | loneliness loss | John Banville | |
| 8e11d17 | Tal vez el amor no nace ahi, no en un repentino arrebato de passion, sino en el reconocimiento y la sencilla aceptacion de, de algo que no se que es | John Banville | ||
| 89a5aaa | She had that look - scared and sort of paralysed but frantic underneath - that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time. | John Banville | ||
| d4739f7 | Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong? | John Banville | ||
| 3cec387 | But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all? We | John Banville | ||
| 9934875 | What age is she now, twenty something. I'm not sure. She is very bright, quite the bluestocking. Not beautiful, however, I admitted that to myself long ago. I cannot pretend this is not a disappointment, for I had hoped that she would be another Anna. She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stand out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and .. | no-he-didn-t wow | John Banville | |
| 44721ef | of her blood. Oh, I do not say these are | John Banville | ||
| 8a82aff | We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations. | John Banville | ||
| 1e8e005 | But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I | John Banville | ||
| 244844f | No wlasnie, przedmioty potrafia przetrwac, a zywi tymczasem znikaja. | John Banville | ||
| 3632176 | Przeszlosc bije we mnie niczym drugie serce. | John Banville | ||
| b21f954 | A wiec, panie doktorze - odezwala sie troche za glosno, radosnym, zdecydowanym tonem gwiazdy filmowej z lat czterdziestych - to wyrok smierci czy dozywocie? | diagnosis life-sentence | John Banville | |
| 8b77c11 | Na milosc boska, nie histeryzuj! - odburknela. - Po prostu umieram, koniec kropka. | John Banville | ||
| eb38487 | Encline aux verites qui tuent, elle n'avait nulle intention de blesser. | John Banville | ||
| 8548a22 | Byc moze cale zycie jest zaledwie dlugim przygotowaniem do chwili, w ktorej sie z nim rozstajemy. | end-of-life life | John Banville | |
| a357280 | ubezhdenieto, koeto nie vsichki khranim na tazi v'zrast, che semeistvata na nashite priiateli sa mnogo simpatichni, po-priiatni i interesni - s edna duma, po-zhelani, - otkolkoto nashite sobstveni? | John Banville | ||
| b52746e | Quello che accade non ha importanza; il momento e tutto. Questo e il mondo d'oro. Il pittore ha radunato il suo piccolo gruppo di persone e le ha poste in questa radura agitata dal vento, in questa delicata luce artificiale, dipingendole come angeli e pagliacci. E un mondo dove niente e perduto, dove di tutto e dato conto pur se il mistero delle cose e preservato; un mondo dove essi possono vivere, per quanto brevemente, per quanto tenuamen.. | John Banville | ||
| f1c4a82 | Sto leggendo Diderot anche riguardo agli attori e alla recitazione. Lui sapeva quanta vita passiamo a recitare una parte. Concepiva la vita come una forma di ipocrisia necessaria, in cui ciascuno recita la sua parte, fingendo di essere se stesso. E vero. Che altro sono mai stato se non un attore, seppur un cattivo attore, troppo coinvolto nel mio ruolo, non sufficientemente distaccato, non abbastanza freddo. Si, si, e cosi. Mi reputate fred.. | John Banville | ||
| d84191a | W mojej pamieci jest swoim wlasnym cieniem. Ktora z nich jest realniejsza, kobieta, ktora rozlozyla sie na trawiastej skarpie moich wspomnien, czy tez ta powloka kurzu i suchy szpik, jedyne jej slady, ktore przechowala ziemia? Na pewno gdzies trwa dla innych, ruchoma figura w gabinecie figur woskowych, jakim jest pamiec, ale ich obraz jest inny niz ten, ktory ja nosze w myslach, a wszystkie roznia sie miedzy soba. W ten sposob czlowiek rozg.. | John Banville | ||
| 2ee7b5b | Zaden szczegol ludzkiego oblicza nie zniesie dluzszej obserwacji. | John Banville | ||
| f0b765d | Pacjent - powiedziala mi pewnego dnia Anna, juz blisko konca - to dziwne slowo. "Cierpliwy". A ja wcale nie jestem cierpliwa." | words | John Banville |