Claire Messud Quotes

What makes us afraid is our great freedom in the face of the emptiness that has still to be filled.

Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.

This fear of death infused me with the desire to live, and to live harder.

People are afraid of detail and complexity.

Most of us harbour a significant amount of subconscious fear about death, and act out of this fear in our daily lives.

We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.

There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

I think about death every day - what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.

Sometimes I feel I'm living a meaningless life, and I get frightened.

People say to me that I can't be nervous because I've had such a wealth of experience, but I tell them that I have never done this particular part before.

To put meaning in one's life may end in madness, But life without meaning is the torture Of restlessness and vague desire-It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

It's ironic that in our culture everyone's biggest complaint is about not having enough time; yet nothing terrifies us more than the thought of eternity.

My day-to-day local issues are rooted in an underlying fear of death.

Less base the fear of death than fear of life.

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of his world

The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness.

Whenever I go back to London, I have this horrible feeling that something bad will happen, and I won't be able to get back to America. It's a nightmare feeling.

Claustrophobia is a theme that I feel is really rife in 'Sound of my Voice' and struggling to come up for air from that feeling.

We live in a very scary time. Or should I say we don't live at all.

One lives one's life under constant tension, until it's time to go for good