Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

It could make you slightly psychotic if you really focused on the idea that girls had holes under their clothes. Holes that suggested, in the absence they pointed out, that they could be filled, and that you could do the filling.

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.

The bad moment had fled. All you ever had to do to make a bad moment flee was acquiesce. This was true everywhere in life, even though so much of Loci's focus was supposedly on not acquiescing.

Jules listened to this soliloquy in grim silence; she hardly knew what to say. Ash was describing an enclosed world that Jules too had been given a chance to enter, but hadn't wanted to. She still didn't want to, but the descriptions of the closeness and intensity of that world only increased her loneliness. "Go on," was all she said.

Love is when you feel, like, oh, oh, my heart hurts," Alby said. "Or like when you see a dog and you feel like you have to touch its head." He looked at Greer. "Like the way Cory is touching your head now." Cory stopped the movement of his hand, just froze there in her hair.

But it had seemed, when Cory broke up with Greer, that she became like a piece of knotted wire. Where were the qualities he had loved in her? He had taken on some of them himself. Because of course everyone was soft and hard. Skeleton and skin. But women claimed for themselves the province of softness, which men cast off. Maybe it was easier to say you liked it in a woman. But really, maybe you wished you had it yourself.

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.

the Siamese-twinship of marriage

Parents were the ones who handed you law school admission test study guides unprompted, and when you responded with revulsion or rage, they defensively said, "But I just wanted you to have something to fall back on.

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need.

Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate.

It was impossible to look out on the city from high up without thinking for a second of 9/11, even nine years later. Any overarching view of the city seemed to call for a brief, noble hush. Smokestacks steamed; lights stuttered; there was movement along the grid. The quiet moment now wasn't unpleasurable. It was just a moment of seriousness, born in something terrible, but now uncoupled from it.

To keep people from the particulars of your life kept you from being seen as one thing or another, and so it was possible you could be thought of as anything, or even as everything.

But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore, except, 'Wasn't it funny that time in tenth grade

This was New York, where famous people drank from the same trough you did,...

to own only a little talent . . . was an awful, plaguing thing . . . being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time. —Mary Robison, "Yours

Everyone has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.

Why did a strong woman need to be her own shield

How was it, Cory kept thinking, that when a person died they were no longer anywhere? You could search the entire world and never find them. It was one thing for a body to stop working and be carted away under a sheet; it was another thing for the sense of that person to evaporate. The textural and indisputable sense, as strong but as hard to pinpoint as a gas.

She wondered if some people got to feel fully full, or whether it was everyone's fate to feel as if the state of being human was one in which the self was like a bag of something wonderful that had already been half-eaten.

How are any of us in this room supposed to care about anything, when we're constantly being pulled back by unbearable thoughts and feelings?

Friends don't let friends wear beards without mustaches.

To live in a world of female power—mutual power—felt like a desirable dream to Zee. Having power meant that the world was like a pasture with the gate left open, and that there was nothing stopping you, and you could run and run.

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