Top 50 Claire Messud Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Yes, writing is essential to me. It’s my way of living in the world.”

— Claire Messud

3. “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

4. “But we’re lost in a world of appearances now.”

— Claire Messud

5. “I wish it hadn’t happened; but what good does this do? I can wish it wouldn’t happen again – but here too, if I’m wishing the impossible, it will do no good at all.”

— Claire Messud

6. “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.”

— Claire Messud

7. “That’s so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She’s always been that way.”

— Claire Messud

8. “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 a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’”

— Claire Messud

9. “It’s a different story depending on where you start: who’s good, who’s bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren’t anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward.”

— Claire Messud

10. “To my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.”

— Claire Messud

11. “To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value.”

— Claire Messud

12. “We read to find life, in all its possibilities.”

— Claire Messud

13. “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.”

— Claire Messud

14. “An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story ‘The Lady With the Little Dog.’”

— Claire Messud

15. “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.”

— Claire Messud

16. “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

17. “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.”

— Claire Messud

18. “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?”

— Claire Messud

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Claire Messud

21. “The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art.”

— Claire Messud

22. “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.”

— Claire Messud

23. “With someone you’ve always known and have loved without thinking, there’s the strangeness of knowing everything and nothing about them at the same time.”

— Claire Messud

24. “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.”

— Claire Messud

25. “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 afar.”

— Claire Messud

26. “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.”

— Claire Messud

27. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast breathing skin, will insist otherwise.”

— Claire Messud

28. “It’s hard to grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time.”

— Claire Messud

29. “I’m not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don’t seek a wide swath of feedback.”

— Claire Messud

30. “Life is about deciding what matters. It’s about the fantasy that determines the reality.”

— Claire Messud

31. “If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”

— Claire Messud

32. “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.”

— Claire Messud

33. “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 earnest self.”

— Claire Messud

34. “Geniuses have the shortest biographies.”

— Claire Messud

35. “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.”

— Claire Messud

36. “Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.”

— Claire Messud

37. “I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.”

— Claire Messud

38. “But just as the world is opening up, it’s closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.”

— Claire Messud

39. “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?”

— Claire Messud

40. “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.”

— Claire Messud

41. “Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are.”

— Claire Messud

42. “If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I’d say the question ‘How then must we live?’ is at the heart of it, for me.”

— Claire Messud

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Claire Messud

45. “I don’t want to sleep,′ my mother said. ‘I want – for God’s sake, I want to wake up.”

— Claire Messud

46. “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, etc.”

— Claire Messud

47. “All our stores are more or less made up, after all.”

— Claire Messud

48. “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 seem irremovable.”

— Claire Messud

49. “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, just not understood.”

— Claire Messud

50. “It is what you haven’t done that will torment you.”

— Claire Messud