Claire Messud Quotes

Instead, we just sat there, together but really apart, watching a show about a stranger and all her secrets, while keeping our own to ourselves, as always.

Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.

She was built for crowds. She has never come any closer to life than the dinner table.

There's love, and certainly children you care about more than yourself. But nevertheless, we're alone in our heads.

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

In life, usually, even if you live in a big city, you can count on your fingers on one hand how many real friends you have; that's human.

Total intimacy is a myth; that said, a particular kind of loneliness can be both beautiful and fruitful.

I don't want people to be lonely. I would like them to find partners.

I never want to feel too far away from people. I think that's when you get in trouble.

I think everyone is lonely whether you are in a good marriage or a bad marriage somewhere down the line you become lonely, and to get rid of that loneliness you have to try really hard.

I have always been very interested in the idea of loneliness and the presumption that romantic relationships are supposed to rid you of that.

We all have thoughts and feelings that we believe are fundamental to our lives but that are better left unspoken.

We're lonely, but we're afraid of intimacy.

Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.

It's not so," I said. "And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us.

Because I have been lonely, I value love.

The heart is a place of secrets.

In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties - all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion - these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close to each other. You're far better off having someone to sleep next to then having someone to sleep with because you have to trust someone you sleep next to.