Claire Messud Quotes
We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else.
Quotes to Explore
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I think I'm very stoic. Death and dying are things that I'm used to.
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Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber is the greatest bad guy in a movie ever.
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Sometimes, all the interviews, those are the toughest thing for me, but once you really start to do it a lot and start to get used to it, I can find some fun in those parts, too. Because playing golf is the easiest thing for me, and that's something I'm so used to; that's why it was always easy.
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I got into the race and people literally laughed. They thought I had no chance of winning.
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Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.
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The worst thing for an effective war on terror is the suspicion of states about the objectives.
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I know what I look like - a weird, sad clown puppet. I'm fine with that.
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In our Western culture, although death has come out of the closet, it is still not openly experienced or discussed. Allowing dying to be so intensely present enriches both the preciousness of each moment and our detachment from it.
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It's so hard for me to wrap my head around the concept of truth, I don't even know what people mean by it.
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For the record, I have long suspected that my favorite book is actually 'Charlotte's Web.'
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The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance.
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The only reality show that I do tune in for is 'Shark Tank.'
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A filial son to his father can be a traitorous subject to his ruler.
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Without this spirit, Modernist architecture cannot fully exist. Since there is often a mismatch between the logic and the spirit of Modernism, I use architecture to reconcile the two.
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The real difference between the United States and other nations lies not in the words of the preamble to the Constitution, but in the fact that the substantive clauses of that Constitution are enforced by individuals independent of and not beholden to the elected branches.
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Many a poor soul has had to suffer from the weight of the debts on him, finding no rest or peace after death.
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Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.
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Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn't so much information about him. Today, you're on television all the time.
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We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.” In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.
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I demanded more rights for women because I know what women had to put up with.
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In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.
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Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I'll be damned if I'll let you sacrifice me!
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We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else.
