Ten of My Favourite Claire Messud Quotes
Love reading? Then it’s likely you will love a good quote from your favourite author. This article covers Claire Messud’s Top 10 Popular and Famous Quotes that we at Australia Unwrapped have collected from some of his greatest works. Claire Messud quotes to remember and here you will find 10 of the best. A memorable quote can stay with you and can be used along your journey. Choosing Claire Messud’s top 10 quotes is not easy, but here they are:
Popular Quotes
“Life is about deciding what matters. It’s about the fantasy that determines the reality.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“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 speak to my father ever day on the telephone — every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it’s pretty gray and a big muggy too? 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.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“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 or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it’s going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It’s both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl
“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.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“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.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“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.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“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.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“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, The Woman Upstairs
“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.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
“Who is he who walks always beside you? No-fucking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
10 Famous Quotes by Author Claire Messud
10 quotes by Claire Messud there you go! It’s never an easy task picking the best quotations from great writers, so please if you disagree or have more to add, please comment and share your opinions. My 10 greatest Claire Messud quotes will likely be different from yours; however, that’s the best thing about them, each quote can mean something different to each person. So don’t wait, comment and shares your best Claire Messud Quote.
One Final Bonus – Claire Messud Quote
“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 my classroom, to the third grad, they’re well and truly gone — they’re full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than “dutiful daughter” is “looking good”; everyone used to know that. But we’re lost in a world of appearances now.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
