Ingrid

“I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized-a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle-then this only makes the pictures the more mine.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Life is about deciding what matters. It's about the fantasy that determines the reality.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
― William James