Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is?
Claire MessudIf youโre reading to find friends, youโre in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isnโt โIs this a potential friend for me?โ but โIs this character alive?'
Claire MessudLife's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get through.
Claire MessudTo my mind, Guernica is the most important online intellectual and literary journal in America today.
Claire MessudIt'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 MessudThe apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evokedโฆ Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.
Claire Messud