“If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a ch...” — Claire Messud Quote

“If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it.”

“I believed in their wisdom, and their gifts for happiness, or at least contentment, gifts that had eluded the next generation of my mother, my father, and my aunt.”

“They, too, carry the source within them. But for their children, cast into a windblown century without God, where is there to be but alone and unseen, anonymous in the crowd? Who will carry us back to a place that lives only in the vast imaginary? 'Do you not see how a caged bird, oh youth, / Breaks into song when it recalls its ancestral home?”