Top 100 Meg Wolitzer Quotes
#1. Being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, it's unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow.
Meg Wolitzer
#2. Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you.
Meg Wolitzer
#3. You got caught up in some fantasy, and now you can't see anything at all.
Meg Wolitzer
#4. Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves with almost no chance for reinvention.
Meg Wolitzer
#5. People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.
Meg Wolitzer
#6. There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed.
Meg Wolitzer
#7. Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.
Meg Wolitzer
#8. Plus, constantly worrying about money is *boring*. Use your brain ... to be creative.
Meg Wolitzer
#9. You are the only one I can trust about this, Ash said. Which was maybe just another version of what Cathy Kiplinger had said to Jules: you are weak.
Meg Wolitzer
#10. it was always slightly off when everyone was in a couple except for one person. the entire group tended to single that person out, as if to try and make him feel better in his aloneness, as though it were an unnatural state.
Meg Wolitzer
#11. Now she felt as if she were dully humming with an unpleasant, low-grade drunkenness.
Meg Wolitzer
#12. Apparently, something can happen inside someone you love - it can just happen somehow - and like magic she thinks that she's had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone.
Meg Wolitzer
#13. Everyone else seemed to be circling their desired careers, not inhabiting them yet.
Meg Wolitzer
#14. Power structures were always fairly easy to figure out if you took a moment to observe the people involved.
Meg Wolitzer
#15. I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary. How can I just have this one life?
Meg Wolitzer
#16. But of course people were different, she remembered; they were allowed to be different.
Meg Wolitzer
#17. But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.
Meg Wolitzer
#18. When you located someone from the past online, it was like finding that person trapped behind glass in the permanent collection of a museum. You knew they were still there, and it seemed to you as if they would stay there forever.
Meg Wolitzer
#19. Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.
Meg Wolitzer
#20. Fawn face, the expression a deer makes not when it's caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts.
Meg Wolitzer
#21. If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?
Meg Wolitzer
#22. Books light the fire - whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
Meg Wolitzer
#23. Having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children, you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations.
Meg Wolitzer
#24. When do I stop? When I'm tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tell s you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.
Meg Wolitzer
#25. This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it ...
Meg Wolitzer
#26. Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.
Meg Wolitzer
#27. It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.
Meg Wolitzer
#28. Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.
Meg Wolitzer
#29. What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?"
"Be a man, I guess," Ethan said ...
Meg Wolitzer
#30. Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?"
"Hmm," said Jules. "Yes. The Holocaust.
Meg Wolitzer
#31. We each have only one voice. And the world is so loud. Sometimes I think that the quiet ones have figured out that the best way to get other people's attention is not to shout, but to whisper. Which makes everyone listen a little harder.
Meg Wolitzer
#32. The rest of life - that imperfect thing - waiting.
Meg Wolitzer
#33. Sometimes you think people will be around forever, and then you lose them with no warning at all.
Meg Wolitzer
#34. Because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.
Meg Wolitzer
#35. No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.
Meg Wolitzer
#36. Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.
Meg Wolitzer
#37. Closure, that impossible thing that no one had ever experienced in life, because there always seemed to be a little aperture, a slit of light.
Meg Wolitzer
#38. Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it.
Meg Wolitzer
#39. To find out what another human being feels, a person who isn't you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That's what writing is supposed to do.
Meg Wolitzer
#40. Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.
Meg Wolitzer
#41. Nothing. That was a nostalgia kiss," he said. "It's sepia colored. People in that kiss are . . . wearing stovepipe hats . . . and children are rolling hoops down the street, and eating penny candy.
Meg Wolitzer
#42. you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're
Meg Wolitzer
#43. And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?
Meg Wolitzer
#44. The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.
Meg Wolitzer
#45. But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful.
Meg Wolitzer
#46. Everyone," she continues, looking around at all of us, "has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.
Meg Wolitzer
#47. Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.
Meg Wolitzer
#49. The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers
Meg Wolitzer
#50. Maybe googling people kills them ... You keep looking them up to see where they are, until one day you look them up and they're dead.
Meg Wolitzer
#51. When I wrote 'The Interestings,' I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this.
Meg Wolitzer
#52. I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.
Meg Wolitzer
#53. It's basically my fear about what happens when you leave a room. Everyone says the thing about you that you really can't bear.
Meg Wolitzer
#54. Twitter. You know what it is? Termites with microphones.
Meg Wolitzer
#55. And then like two people jumping off a rock into water, I guess we both fell helplessly into sleep. I'm not sure which of us gets there first.
Meg Wolitzer
#56. Does [your music] have to be a job? And as for your actual job ... do you have to think of [it] as a consolation prize? ... What if you just *played*? Isn't it possible you'd also like your job more, because you wouldn't think of it as something that's secretly had to replace this other thing?
Meg Wolitzer
#57. Maybe she had "no more books left inside her," as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.
Meg Wolitzer
#58. But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don't appear at the time as knowledge at all
Meg Wolitzer
#59. What was it about needy girls? Jules wondered. They felt like they had the right to be needy, because they knew that other people would be interested in - although annoyed at - their needs. ... They got all the attention. Boys turned their focus toward them, and messy situations results.
Meg Wolitzer
#60. I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.
Meg Wolitzer
#61. The mind plays tricks on itself in order to stay in one piece.
Meg Wolitzer
#62. In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment.
Meg Wolitzer
#63. Part of the beauty of love was that you didn't need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn't necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.
Meg Wolitzer
#64. But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.
Meg Wolitzer
#65. Because friend was encompassing, and here it encompassed so much, including the contradictions.
Meg Wolitzer
#66. For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force.
Meg Wolitzer
#67. Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star ...
Meg Wolitzer
#68. We're talking about the novel, right? But maybe we're not. We're talking about ourselves. And I guess that's what can start to happen when you talk about a book.
Meg Wolitzer
#69. In 'The Interestings' I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.
Meg Wolitzer
#70. Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny's great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn't rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded.
Meg Wolitzer
#71. People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.
Meg Wolitzer
#73. What you knew, felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had always perhaps been there, though to a lesser extent.
Meg Wolitzer
#74. Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposedto have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.
Meg Wolitzer
#75. Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.
Meg Wolitzer
#77. They should hand out vibrators if they're going to demand so much of you that you can't find time for a private life.
Meg Wolitzer
#78. While it's true that some writers, when taking on love and war, find the task too big, or only succeed in one but not the other, Mengestu tracks both themes with authority and feeling.
Meg Wolitzer
#79. I know I still cause harm, probably a ton of it no matter what I do. And it kills me, it just kills me, that maybe the best you can ever do is cause less harm. But there you have it.
Meg Wolitzer
#80. But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.
Meg Wolitzer
#81. Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say. We were all looking for our voice.
Meg Wolitzer
#82. Even not knowing that yet, she felt an intuitive urgency. What she wanted
and wanted now
was to be loved by someone who excited her.
Meg Wolitzer
#83. The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like ... robotics. Just another subject that she couldn't understand at all.
Meg Wolitzer
#84. But you can't say that what you learn in English class doesn't matter. That great writing doesn't make a difference. I'm
Meg Wolitzer
#85. I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.
Meg Wolitzer
#86. Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness.
Meg Wolitzer
#87. Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.
Meg Wolitzer
#88. Jealousy was essentially "I want what you have," while envy was "I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can't have it.
Meg Wolitzer
#89. You're telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone's an artist? But here's the thing: if everyone's an artist, then no one is.
Meg Wolitzer
#90. But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place.
Meg Wolitzer
#91. I might have things to look forward to again, things I can't even imagine yet.
Meg Wolitzer
#92. Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure.
Meg Wolitzer
#93. But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.
Meg Wolitzer
#94. ...age sixty-eight and still wanting love to exist in a pure column of light, still convinced that it could.
Meg Wolitzer
#95. The students lurked on the edges of their teachers' lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory.
Meg Wolitzer
#96. No, of course not. I just feel content," she said carefully.
"That's an old person's word," said Ethan.
Meg Wolitzer
#97. I think everyone is always measuring themselves against other people to a certain degree; it happens automatically, and it's hard not to be this way at least some of the time.
Meg Wolitzer
#98. illustrations of anthropomorphic piles of resin with dialogue bubbles above them: "Hello there, I'm Frankincense. Well, technically I'm Frankincense's monster, but everyone gets that wrong." One
Meg Wolitzer
#99. Oh boo hoo, everyone's life was hard, and if you'd survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough.
Meg Wolitzer
#100. Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly.
Meg Wolitzer
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