Claire Messud

“To a degree, literary taste is a subjective matter. One can admire a work of fiction without particularly enjoying it; one can dislike a novel even while appreciating its value.”

“From anywhere: where once he had feared that this immense city would set him adrift, a spinning atom in the ether, and where once he had seen in this the ultimate terror of insignificance, he now, and suddenly, and so clearly, saw that his fate had led him here. His fate had taken him off two trains this morning, had raised him to the surface at Whitehall Street, had shown him the spinning atoms, unraveling, the end of life, all of them people tethered by love, and habit, and work, and meaning, tied into a meaning suddenly exploded, because contrary to all he had imagined, being tied, being known, did not keep you safe. Quite the opposite: this, surely, was the meaning of Emerson, which he had so willfully and for so long misunderstood: great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Even their cousins know nothing about them. He had never been known rightly - how could he be, in the carapace of his ill-fitting names - but had thought that this imperfect knowledge was to be worked upon, bettered, but of course: mutability, precisely the capacity to spin like an atom, untethered, this thrill of absolute unknownness was not something to be feared. It was the point of it all. To be absolutely unrelated. Without context. To be truly and in every way self-reliant. At last.”

“But the shadow settled on them, obliquely, and was shuffled off only when Danielle rose to put on music, a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonies wavering in the small room, as if to remind them both that beauty and loss were inseparably entwined.”

“It all came down to entitlement, and one's sense of it. Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparent inability to see the light. he would have to show them - of this he was ever more decided, with a flamelike conviction. But he was already thirty, and the question was how?”

“An inchoate ball of ambition, Julius knew that he had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.”

“That's so her. You know, torn between Big Ideas and a party. She's always been that way.”

“Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparent inability to see the light. He would have to show them.”

“You could control what you did, if you wanted to....Was it efficient? Was it productive? ...So many people didn't bother -- a kind of stupidity...a lack of vision, or purpose. Anyone who said they just woke up and found themselves in the place they'd always wanted to be was lying; and anyone who believed such a person was a fool. It was all a matter of will.”

“An inchoate mass of ambition, Julius knew that he had soon, soon to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise, he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return. ”

“The 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 evoked. She had kept some books...which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children's books...that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self.”

“The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole.”

“I don't want to sleep,' my mother said. 'I want -- for God's sake, I want to wake up.”

“Geniuses have the shortest biographies.”