Claire Dederer > Quotes

“I had discovered something; there was a pleasure in becoming something new. You could will yourself into a fresh shape. Now all I had to do was figure out how to do it out there, in my life.”
― Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

“Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: "Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling."

Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, "Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again."

Fear. I hadn't even known it was there.”
― Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

“What if the opposite of good wasn't bad? What if the opposite of good was real?”
― Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

“You are a hypocrite over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end.
The way you consume art doesn't make you a bad person, or a good one. You'll have to find some other way to accomplish that.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Reality is an easy commodity in the Front Range. There's weather, and there are animals that are thinking about eating you, and there's all that beauty. It sort of whomps you on the head. It's strange that we use the word "unreal" to describe beauty-it's my experience that beauty drags us by the hair into the real.”
― Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

“Rage is the emotion of the powerless”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“My books kept me from loneliness, all my life.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“What do we do with the art of monsters from the past? Look for ourselves there - in the monstrousness. Look for mirrors of what we are, rather than evidence for how wonderful we've become.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Rage is the emotion of the powerless,” said my therapist to me sometime in the mid-1990s.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“This idea of genius, and what it is allowed, attaches itself to certain specific people. Hint: they aren’t women.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it; when we want our opinion to become fact. When we want to push our obsession onto the next guy. When we don’t want to hold our heroes accountable.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“If so, is it worth my potential loss of status for victims to be able to say what happened to them? My answer is, tentatively: yes. Even though loss of status can be pretty fucking awful. This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“And so, like many or most women, I have a dog in this particular fight: when I ask what to do about the art of monstrous men, I’m not just sympathizing with their victims—I’ve been in the same shoes, or similar. I have the memory of those monstrous things being done to me. I don’t come to these questions with a coldness or a dispassionate point of view. I come as a sympathizer to the accusers. I am the accusers. And yet I still want to consume the art. Because, out in front of all of that, I’m a human. And I don’t want to miss out on anything. Why should I? Why should I be deprived of Chinatown or Sleeper? This tension—between what I’ve been through as a woman and the fact that I want to experience the freedom and beauty and grandeur and strangeness of great art—this is at the heart of the matter. It’s not a philosophical query; it’s an emotional one.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“As Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon, the greatest difficulty in writing is “knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“The performance of masculinity, and its conflation with genius, has not been a great thing for women, who are simultaneously the genius’s victims and forever excluded from the club of genius.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Jonathan's voice was quiet now. "Thank you for sharing this evening with me. In yoga, we say 'Namaste,' which means 'I bow to the divine in you.'" He bowed his dork-knobbed head and said, "Namaste." We bowed back and mumbled, "Namaste." On my tongue, the new word felt as though it contained its own foreign spice.”
― Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

“No matter where you go in the world, a German will have beaten you there, clad in a sweaty black T-shirt and a smug expression.”
― Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

“Because we are atomized individuals with no collective power, we are left with a grandiose yet ultimately meaningless sense of the importance of our purchases, our gestures, our decisions.

Fisher's book asks us to accept the amorality of our own consumption. In other words, we keep looking to consumption as the site of our ethical choices, but the answer doesn't lie there. Our judgment doesn't make us better consumers. It actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle, more complicit in what Fisher calls "the atmosphere of late capitalism.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“When you’re having a moral feeling, self-congratulation is never far behind. You are setting your emotion in a bed of ethical language, and you are admiring yourself doing it. We are governed by emotion, emotion around which we arrange language. The transmission of our virtue feels extremely important, and strangely exciting.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“The poet William Empson said life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“What makes great art depends on who we are and what we live through.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“we only know better now because people have spoken up. It’s not like people just wake up one day enlightened. —”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“The ambition and the finishing: These are what make the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Yoga is just gymnastics for uncoordinated people.”
― Claire Dederer, Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

“The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Some of these children grew up to be adults whose dreamscape was taken away from them. Did they lose an imagined landscape where great swathes of their childhoods had been spent? I'm picturing a hillside, strip-mined.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Hickey goes on: “So beauty is not the product of communities. It creates communities.”
― Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

“Sigh. These were my people now that I was a writer, people who didn't understand anything. I mean, they understood perfectly the thing I cared most about - books - but basically were moron-level elsewhere.”
― Claire Dederer, Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning