Tawnya > Tawnya's Quotes

“what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don’t all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We’re all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish,”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Life is about deciding what matters. It’s about the fantasy that determines the reality. Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible?”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. 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,”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“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. Maybe I’ve learned it’s a mistake to reveal her at all.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“he was playing on the climbing structure by himself—or “by his own,” as the children sometimes charmingly put it.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I wanted him to reassure me, and when I saw he wasn’t going to, I thought, This is when the shit hits the fan.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“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, The Woman Upstairs

“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, The Woman Upstairs