List of Claire Messud Quotes

We Live In A Funny Time, A Funny Era, When Desire, To Be Adult Desire, Has To Be Conceived As Sexual. And That Didn't Used To Be The Case. Sexuality Is A Social Construction As Much As Anything Else And I Think The Realities Of Sexuality Don't Always Fit Into The Social Constructions That We Have, And We Live In A Goal-oriented Time - On All Fronts.

But We're Lost In A World Of Appearances Now.

Does Being Happy Simply Create More Time, In The Way That Being Sad, As We All Know, Slows Time And Thickens It, Like Cornstarch In A Sauce?).

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.

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?

To My Mind, Guernica Is The Most Important Online Intellectual And Literary Journal In America Today.

If You’re Reading To Find Friends, You’re In Deep Trouble.

Maybe That, Really, Is As Good A Definition As Any Of An Artist In The World: A Ruthless Person.

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, Even At That Time Fully Two Years After My Mother's Death, I'd Catch Myself Thinking About Her As Alive; And Would Suddenly Remember, An Admonitory Finger Of Grief Upon My Breast, That She Was Gone.

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 Clairvoyants To See Ghosts; But Who Sees The Invisible Emotions, The Unrecorded Events? Who Is That Sees Love, More Evanescent Than Any Ghost, Let Alone Can Catch It? Who Are You Tell Me That I Don't Know What Love Is?

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.

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 Think Women's Anger Sits Less Well Than Anything Else. Women's Anger Is Very Scary To People, And To No One More Than Other Women Who Think: Oh, Goodness, Well, If I Let The Lid Off, Where Would We Be?