We think that - as kids, you know - that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place, but that, as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that both children and adults create narratives from their experiences, blending facts with imagination.
Claire Messud's quote highlights the idea that the difference between childhood and adulthood isn't as clear-cut as it seems. While children are often seen as imaginative storytellers living in fiction, adults do the same by interpreting the facts they encounter and enriching their realities with imagination and context. This perspective challenges the notion that adults exist purely in a realm of truth and facts.
In practice
In a speech about creativity in adulthood, this quote could emphasize the importance of imagination.
Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.
Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all.
If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.
It's the same with menus and men and just about anything else: we think we're choosing things for ourselves, but in fact we may not be choosing anything. It could be that everthing's being decided in advance and we pretend we're making choices. Free will may be an illusion. I often think that.
I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be.
Both happiness and unhappiness depend on perception
As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Complexes are psychic contents which are outside the control of the conscious mind. They have been split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, being at all times ready to hinder or to reinforce the conscious intentions.
And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.
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