The Burning Girl Quotes

“Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it's going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“With someone you’ve always known and have loved without thinking, there’s the strangeness of knowing everything and nothing about them at the same time.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“It's a different story depending on where you start: who's good, who's bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren't anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to think I wouldn’t have rebuffed her, but it’s possible that I would have. It’s possible that I would have felt the need to exercise the power if I’d had it. But she didn’t grant me the opportunity”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“All our stores are more or less made up, after all.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn't want to be reminded that it was fake.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“It's hard to grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and yous tart to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you've lost them, but because you know you need to take care...Beware darkness, isolation, the outdoors, unlocked windows, men you don't know. And then you realize too that even men you know, or thought you knew, might not be okay.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“But we don’t really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it’s our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we acknowledge the artifice, we accept that we’ve made a world that excludes what we ignore. Like gods, we invent a world that makes sense.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“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 change in our relationship.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“He said that’s what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Don’t plan it, don’t overthink it, just let it happen, you’ve got to find a way to bridge the chasm from here to there, from this unthinkable present to some unthinkable future . . .”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“but this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life’s tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in flood: you can only take in, you can only grasp, so much.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“There are the social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty... and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood's clouds in glory to live, ever after, in our earthly realm”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Without it being said, I was treated as a kid with a bright future and Cassie, well, she wasn’t necessarily not going to have one, but her path would be different from mine. Without anybody saying so outright, I was being told that my path was the more valuable. I got that from my parents, and from Mr. Cartwright when he chose me for speech team, and from my teachers when they patted me on the back and gave me good grades, and from my grandmother, who, when she asked me about Cassie at Thanksgiving and I told her we’d been drifting apart, caressed my cheek with her shiny hand that smelled of rosewater and said, “It’s hard growing up, because each of us must follow our own star”—which was, of itself, pretty neutral, but then she added, “And some of us have brighter stars to follow than others, I’m afraid.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“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 time to be alone. When I was by myself—and I loved being in my room on my own, reading on my bed or listening to music and staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars that my father had stuck on the ceiling when I was small—I could hear my mother moving around the house, the creaky boards upstairs or the faint murmur of the radio from the kitchen, and then I could smell dinner: the onions in the pan, or the whiff of meat cooking or the delicious pastry scent of a baking tart. Even when I was alone, I liked to know that I wasn’t really entirely alone; but that wasn’t how it was for Cassie.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“My mother was annoyed with me throughout their visit—ostensibly because I wasn’t being a good enough hostess to the cousins, but really because she found it overwhelming to have so many members of my father’s family staying; but they were all so good-natured that she couldn’t show it, or even allow that she was mildly irritable. The cousins were there on my father’s account, and she wanted very much to be a good enough person not to be annoyed, because he himself was that sort of good person, and put up with my mother’s family without ever, apparently, losing his temper.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that nobody we knew had ever really seen the building: it was the sort of thing you wished you’d done, without actually wishing to do it.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“Cassie could be affectionate and scornful at the same time, and I always felt that if I wasn't careful, the scorn might win out.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that nobody we knew had ever really seen the building: it was the sort of thing you wished you'd done, without actually wishing to do it.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“For real?' Cassie's eyes glittered, and it occurred to me that all along she'd expected me to stop us. She'd goaded and teased me, made out like I was a wimp; but she also relied on me to keep us safe.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

“I imagined that the building carried the sadness of the women who'd been trapped there...I didn't see them--there was no visible mass of ghosts peering out of the hollowed windows--but I couldn't help but feel they marked the territory.”
― Claire Messud, The Burning Girl