Quotes from Hilma Wolitzer

Time pulses from the afternoon like blood from a serious wound.

My adrenaline started pumping anytime I was within a hundred yards of a bookshop. I loved books nearly as much as I loved clothes. And that's saying something. The feel of them and the smell of them. A bookshop was like like an Aladdin's Cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look.

Only reading, she knew, could distract her from her obsessive thoughts and restore her sense of peace.

Only reading, she knew, could distract her from her obssessive thoughts and restore her sense of peace.

She was the product of her circumstances, of her time and place...

Bee had been the glue that held them all together, then he was the Velcro. Not as secure, maybe, but there would be an awful tearing sound if he pulled away.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language, making the creative process something like eavesdropping at a party for which you've had the fun of drawing up the guest list. Loneliness usually doesn't set in until the work is finished, and all the partygoers and their imagined universe have disappeared.

The worst moment came when Julie bleated, "Mom, Mom," sounding as plaintive as some lamb separated from the flock.

But if they spoke of Bee, he believed he would not be able to bear it, and if they didn't, it might be equally terrible.

Amy Weitz had said that the dead seem to hang around for a while, as if to guide and comfort us, and then slowly disappear into an unapproachable distance. How did we let them go?

I thought how difficult it was, how impossible all marriages really are, each person coming to battle with separate and complicated histories. It made a case for incest.

The very worst thing, she was certain, was not human misery, but its nakedness, and the naked witness of others.

Writing fiction is a solitary occupation but not really a lonely one. The writer's head is mobbed with characters, images and language.

She reported that when she'd told her doctor she was losing it, he said that she'd likely had too much to begin with.

But then men fall in love with them, and babies are nourished at them, and they sag a little or a lot from years of service, and you mourn the beauty you were late to recognize, and you start to think of cancer.

Nor did the word closure that a few of the mourners said they hoped to achieve. Edward believed that they thought of it as a door closing softly on their grief, but he was afraid it might shut out more than they'd bargained for, memories of love and pleasure as well as of loss.

He readied himself for an outburst of anger that never happened. So he became angry for her and tried not to show it in her presence.

The common workshop goal is revision, not suicide.