Meg Wolitzer quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Meg Wolitzer

Top Meg Wolitzer Quotes

Browse top 57 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Meg Wolitzer.

Favorite Meg Wolitzer Quotes

1. "...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

2. "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

3. "For while they'd stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, 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. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls--even if you'd once been best friends--was now just that, outsiders. Families had their ways. You took note of how other people raised their kids, even other people you loved, and it seemed all wrong. The culture and practices of one's own family were the only way, for better or worse. Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets?" ~ Meg Wolitzer

4. "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

5. "You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing." ~ Meg Wolitzer

6. "Well," said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. "I've always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're not what you thought. And that's what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy." ~ Meg Wolitzer

7. "No, of course not. I just feel content," she said carefully."That's an old person's word," said Ethan." ~ Meg Wolitzer

8. "My being a writer and playing Scrabble are connected. If I have a good writing day, I'll take a break and play online Scrabble. My favorite word as a child was 'carrion,' before I knew what it meant. I later created crossword puzzles, which was a lot about puns, and how words would create these strange, strange things." ~ Meg Wolitzer

9. "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

10. "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

11. "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

12. "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

13. "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

14. "No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be alone, you often felt the unbearable need for another body - not necessarily for sex, but just to rub your foot, to sit across the table, to drop his things around the room in a way that was maddening but still served as a reminder that he was there." ~ Meg Wolitzer

15. "But, she knew, you didn't have to marry your soulmate, and you didn't even have to marry an Interesting. You didn't always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting." ~ Meg Wolitzer

16. "...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

17. "What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?""Be a man, I guess," Ethan said..." ~ Meg Wolitzer

18. "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

19. "When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them." ~ Meg Wolitzer

20. "The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn't do it any longer." ~ Meg Wolitzer

21. "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

22. "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

23. "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

24. "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

25. "Jules told them, "I used to be a camper here myself," but she was confronted with a squeal of feedback, and even when she repeated her words, she saw that it didn't matter to them that she, a middled-aged woman with a sweater draped over her T-shirt and the kind of softened, undefined features that their mothers shared, had once been a camper here. They didn't care, or even really believe it. Because if they did believe it, then they would have had to think that one day they too would become softened and undefined." ~ Meg Wolitzer

26. "Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so beautiful about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last – yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It respected it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind of and worshipful of and being humbled by tiny. You couldn't help but think of your own father as you saw your little girl with hers." ~ Meg Wolitzer

27. "The past is so tenacious." ~ Meg Wolitzer

28. "But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly." ~ Meg Wolitzer

29. "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

30. "The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated." ~ Meg Wolitzer

31. "Deep" ~ Meg Wolitzer

32. "Only when those fathers were not on the premises could they be elevated and deified." ~ Meg Wolitzer

33. "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

34. "People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it." ~ Meg Wolitzer

35. "And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting." ~ Meg Wolitzer

36. "...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

37. "But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did." ~ Meg Wolitzer

38. "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

39. "Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star..." ~ Meg Wolitzer

40. "New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them." ~ Meg Wolitzer

41. "The child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot." ~ Meg Wolitzer

42. "The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls—even if you'd once been best friends—was now just that, outsiders." ~ Meg Wolitzer

43. "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

44. "Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too." ~ Meg Wolitzer

45. "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

46. "Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones." ~ Meg Wolitzer

47. "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

48. "You had only one chance for a signature in life, but most people left no impression." ~ Meg Wolitzer

49. "If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?" ~ Meg Wolitzer

50. "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

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