Top 100 Meg Wolitzer Quotes
#2. Sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.
Meg Wolitzer
#3. Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?
Meg Wolitzer
#4. The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers
Meg Wolitzer
#5. Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.
Meg Wolitzer
#7. Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.
Meg Wolitzer
#8. Cilantro was briefly everywhere, creating miniflurries of conversation about whether or not you liked cilantro, which invariably included someone in the room saying, I can't stand cilantro. It tastes like soap.
Meg Wolitzer
#9. 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
#10. But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful.
Meg Wolitzer
#11. The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.
Meg Wolitzer
#12. Everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren't waiting for that at all.
Meg Wolitzer
#13. High-fiving one another without evident irony.
Meg Wolitzer
#14. 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
#15. In a new environment, it was possible to transform.
Meg Wolitzer
#16. you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're
Meg Wolitzer
#17. 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
#18. Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.
Meg Wolitzer
#19. 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
#20. If you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change.
Meg Wolitzer
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. It's funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time
Meg Wolitzer
#24. To be anorexic ... she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.
Meg Wolitzer
#25. Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.
Meg Wolitzer
#26. We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.
Meg Wolitzer
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. The mind plays tricks on itself in order to stay in one piece.
Meg Wolitzer
#32. 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
#33. First novels were always at least somewhat autobiographical,
Meg Wolitzer
#34. 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
#35. I really love Scrabble. I played it with my mother growing up. We took it everywhere with us. We didn't know then about the two letter words. Who knew that AA, or more controversially, ZA, or QI were words? We were a games family generally.
Meg Wolitzer
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit.
Meg Wolitzer
#40. No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.
Meg Wolitzer
#41. strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit
Meg Wolitzer
#42. Twitter. You know what it is? Termites with microphones.
Meg Wolitzer
#43. 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
#44. I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway.
Meg Wolitzer
#45. I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.
Meg Wolitzer
#46. I guess I feel like grief is this huge part of everything," I say in a burst. "But you're supposed to act like it's not.
Meg Wolitzer
#47. He was like a long beaker in chemistry class, and the top was always bubbling over because some interesting process was taking place inside
Meg Wolitzer
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings.
Meg Wolitzer
#51. The world of law was filled with the fallen, but theater wasn't. No one ever "fell back" onto theater. You had to really, really want it.
Meg Wolitzer
#52. Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story.
Meg Wolitzer
#53. Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.
Meg Wolitzer
#54. 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
#55. She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.
Meg Wolitzer
#56. But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.
Meg Wolitzer
#57. But of course people were different, she remembered; they were allowed to be different.
Meg Wolitzer
#58. I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary. How can I just have this one life?
Meg Wolitzer
#59. Power structures were always fairly easy to figure out if you took a moment to observe the people involved.
Meg Wolitzer
#60. Everyone else seemed to be circling their desired careers, not inhabiting them yet.
Meg Wolitzer
#61. 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
#62. Now she felt as if she were dully humming with an unpleasant, low-grade drunkenness.
Meg Wolitzer
#63. 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
#64. After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.
Meg Wolitzer
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Plus, constantly worrying about money is *boring*. Use your brain ... to be creative.
Meg Wolitzer
#68. If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.
Meg Wolitzer
#69. 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
#70. There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed.
Meg Wolitzer
#72. People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.
Meg Wolitzer
#73. 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
#74. You got caught up in some fantasy, and now you can't see anything at all.
Meg Wolitzer
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?"
"Be a man, I guess," Ethan said ...
Meg Wolitzer
#79. I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.
Meg Wolitzer
#80. Because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.
Meg Wolitzer
#81. Sometimes you think people will be around forever, and then you lose them with no warning at all.
Meg Wolitzer
#82. The rest of life - that imperfect thing - waiting.
Meg Wolitzer
#83. Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you.
Meg Wolitzer
#84. 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
#85. When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.
Meg Wolitzer
#86. Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?"
"Hmm," said Jules. "Yes. The Holocaust.
Meg Wolitzer
#87. He's infuriated that his e-reader allows him to only know the percentage of a book he's read, not the number of pages. This, he thinks, is 92 percent stupid.
Meg Wolitzer
#88. The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn't twinship, and it wasn't romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.
Meg Wolitzer
#89. What if she'd turned down the lightly flung invitation and went about her life, thudding obliviously along like a drunk person, a blind person, a moron, someone who thinks that the small packet of happiness she carries is enough.
Meg Wolitzer
#90. He was a little young to go crazy, but it happened to people.
Meg Wolitzer
#91. You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression.
Meg Wolitzer
#92. Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.
Meg Wolitzer
#93. It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.
Meg Wolitzer
#94. Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.
Meg Wolitzer
#95. This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it ...
Meg Wolitzer
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers.
Meg Wolitzer
#99. 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
#100. If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?
Meg Wolitzer
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