Quotes by Claire Messud

Claire Messud

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.

Fire

Heart

Sorrow

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.

Abiding

Dog

People

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.

Dream

Grief

Mother

Anyway, these books I love, they’re all books by men—every last one of them. Because if it’s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it’s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. I wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman.

Book

Men

Writing

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.

Afar

Departure

Wise

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.

Home

Ideas

Memories

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

Appearance

Lost

World

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?).

Being Sad

Doe

Sauce

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

Biographies

Genius

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

Students

Writing

Follow The Behaviour University in order to get the greatest quotes from the greatest people of all time so that you can tap into your own greatness.

Abiding

Afar

Alive

America

Appearance

Art

Artist

Being Sad

Believe

Biographies

Book

Character

Children

Concern

Currency

Definitions

Departure

Desire

Doe

Dog

Dream

Easy

Essentials

Events

Fall

Fashion

Fire

Forever

Genius

Girl

Giving

Great Things

Grief

Groups

Heart

Home

Human Experience

Humans

Husband

Ideas

Ifs

Intellectual

Laughing

Long

Lost

Love Is

Love You

Lying

Mask

Mean

The Future Blueprint

Tool

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

Tool

The Autobiography

Tool

The Behaviour Diary

Tool

The Dating Diary

Tool

The Relationship Therapist

Tool

Quotes by Claire Messud

Claire Messud

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.

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.

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.

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?).

Geniuses have the shortest biographies.

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

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Topics by Claire Messud

Popular Tools

The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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