Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

Good girls could go far, but they could rarely go the distance.

They all hated Ronald Reagan with a uniform loathing, and it astonished Jules Jacobson that other people in America – a majority, apparently – actually liked him. Nixon had been an outright grotesque, and as far as she could see Reagan was one too, with his oiled hair and padded shoulders like some dunderheaded uncle.

The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers

mostly they had to take pleasure in the moments that no one else would ever witness.

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.

age sixty-eight and still wanting love to exist in a pure column of light, still convinced that it could.

Their life together, which had its distinct rhythms and drama, was generally invisible to everyone else; sometimes she thought they were like performers in a flea circus between shows, doing their microscopic tricks only for each other.

Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

I must have no pride whatsoever that I put up with your coldness

knew everything about him, the way wives do. I even knew the inside of him, having been there that day in Dr. Ruffner's office to review the footage of Joe's colon. We sat and watched light travel through his most intimate inner tubing, and after that we were really bound together for life.

In a new environment, it was possible to transform.

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.

Sometimes you think people will be around forever, and then you lose them with no warning at all.

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.

I think how easy it would be to go through life as a goat. You don't have any problems. You don't fall in love, so you don't get crushed by loss. You just have your simple, farm-animal life, which I envy now.

Boys can't seem to help but leave marks; they scatter them as carelessly as pebbles in a pond.

Everyone else seemed to be circling their desired careers, not inhabiting them yet.

She sat Greer down on the couch and put a glass of very cold water in her hand, because hydration was surprisingly helpful, one of her instructors had said, and water was free, and ubiquitous. It couldn't put out anyone's fire, but it could make the person remember: I am part of the real world, a person holding a glass.

Power and love didn't often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go.

I like being a girl. I just want to be the one who says what that means.

He loved the way women, clothed, had a bosom, a single entity, but when unclothed, it cleaved into two discrete parts, two breasts, like the way you could separate an orange into halves by hooking thumbs into it.

Now they were gathering because the world was unbearable, and they themselves were not.

It was like some kind of full-mind, full-body fuck. That was what it was like when your entire self was engaged. That was what it was like to pay attention.

Walking into someone's house was like entering their body. You saw what they were made of, and what they had been stewing in all this time.