Claire Messud Quotes

A strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food....

All those years we'd been friends, since forever, we'd used the same words and perhaps meant different things--sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we'd never known...

About Author

Claire Messud (born October 8, 1966) is an American/Canadian/French novelist and literature and creative writing professor. She is best known as the author of the novel The Emperor's Children (2006).

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.

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 cat...

And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you'...

But I did wonder what she did, on those afternoons—not just Fridays either, because on the days I had speech team, somebody else’s mother or father dropped her at her door. It seemed like a lot of tim...

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...

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 harmonie...

But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or lovable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter inglorious...

But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive.

But we're lost in a world of appearances now.

But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It’s the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

But you see, everyone has a part to play. In this theater, I’m a daughter and a sister and a mother—never an artist. I could be, I don’t know, Luc Tuymans, and it would mean nothing to them. They allo...

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?),

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

Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart’s desires. Life, art, motherhood. Love and the great seductive promise tha...

Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible?

Her self, then, was represented in her books.

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 chang...

I don't want to sleep,' my mother said. 'I want -- for God's sake, I want to wake up.