Ingrid

“My motivation, even in anticipated shame, lay always in others. You can take the woman out of the upstairs, but you can't take the upstairs out of her.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“Vodka was a liquid cultural yardstick, an eighty-proof vehicle of escape from the socialist daily grind.”
― von Bremzen, Anya

“Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized-a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle-then this only makes the pictures the more mine.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you've found the pot of gold, when you'd thought all the gilt was gone from this world forever. It's enough, for a time - maybe even for a long time - to make you forget that you were ever angry, that you ever knew what anger was at all.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs