Claire Messud Quotes

26 quotes in 504 categories

• We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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,…
• It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to…
• Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.
• Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to…
• If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.
• We read to find life, in all its possibilities.
• To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.
• 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?
• I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market,…
• Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
• That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘Is this…

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