Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I remember going to a son's friend's bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human. "

Related Quotes:

" Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?' "

Claire Messud

Anger

People

Think

" Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch. "

" Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person. "

Claire Messud

Find

Person

" I had a memory span about as long as the lines in a school play. "

" I feel that I have an impractical and deleterious snobbery about the relation of literature to the market. I thought, 'I've become the kind of crap you buy at airports!' It was exciting, but it was not a fantasy I'd ever had. "

" I don't trust people who are likable. "

" My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family. "

" At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath? "

Claire Messud

Than

Day

" I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.' "

" There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it. "

" When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role. "

" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "

" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "

" Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all. "

" For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will? "

Claire Messud

People

Hurricane

" Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about. "

Claire Messud

Question

Serious

" Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged. "

" We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it. "

" I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea. "

" We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story. "

" Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives. "

" If you live in a family or have five roommates, there's some sort of reality check, but when you live alone, there's a lot more leeway for your fantasy life to be more and more a part of your everyday life. "

" The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things? "

" As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants. "

" For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular. "

Claire Messud

Reading

Waste

" I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true. "

" In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world. "

" The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety. "

" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "

" 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.' "