Home > Work > The Burning Girl

The Burning Girl QUOTES

The Burning Girl QUOTES

1 " Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it's going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

2 " With someone you’ve always known and have loved without thinking, there’s the strangeness of knowing everything and nothing about them at the same time. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

3 " It's a different story depending on where you start: who's good, who's bad, what it all means. Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. I can begin when Cassie and I were best friends; or I can begin when we weren't anymore; or I can begin at the dark end and tell it all backward. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

4 " Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

5 " You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

6 " All our stores are more or less made up, after all. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

7 " That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

8 " He said that’s what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

9 " I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

10 " would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to think I wouldn’t have rebuffed her, but it’s possible that I would have. It’s possible that I would have felt the need to exercise the power if I’d had it. But she didn’t grant me the opportunity "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

11 " and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

12 " I discovered I could hate her a bit, and because I didn’t tell her so, because our friendship went along on this reduced, part-time scale that didn’t allow for arguments, there was no noticeable change in our relationship. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

13 " But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

14 " It's hard to grasp all the different things that are going on at one time, or that went on at one time. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

15 " but this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life’s tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in flood: you can only take in, you can only grasp, so much. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

16 " I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

17 " You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and yous tart to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you've lost them, but because you know you need to take care...Beware darkness, isolation, the outdoors, unlocked windows, men you don't know. And then you realize too that even men you know, or thought you knew, might not be okay. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

18 " All those years we'd been friends, since forever, we'd used the same words and perhaps meant different things--sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we'd never known it. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

19 " Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role, and didn't want to be reminded that it was fake. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl

20 " There are social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty...and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood's clouds of glory to live, ever after, in our earthly realm. "

― Claire Messud , The Burning Girl