Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

He paused to wonder which Disney character Jules was, and realized that Disney did not make women or girls or woodland animals that were like her.

You had to train your mind to remember: human being lying here at my feet, not someone to feel contempt toward.

The more you were not with a person, the more your lives diverged.

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?

happen. And you don't always have to feel the compulsion to keep striving toward something for the sake of striving. No one will think less of you. There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.

they both knew, back then, that her envy had no power of its own; it was a sickly and spreading thing that enclosed her, and all she could do was make lightly sarcastic jokes in order to expel a little hostility and remain friends with Ash and Ethan.

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.

people could not get enough of what they'd lost, even if they no longer really wanted it.

Girls weren't weak. They had a softness sometimes, but not all the time.

It's so wonderful that all of you have so much more freedom than I did. But along with that freedom can sometimes come a sense that you don't need other women. And that isn't true.

the money that was scattered around me like an uninteresting garnish.

When a man speaks that way, people say he has authority. When a woman does, everyone resents her and thinks she's his mother. Or their nagging wife.

Because of course everyone was so 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.

Those moments of strangeness. Life is full of them.

All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family.

People rarely spoke of a breakup as tragic; instead, breakups were part of life. But when you and the other person broke up, you could look for them everywhere, and maybe you would physically find them, but even if they were the same person, they were not for you; they were not yours. The evaporation of love was like a kind of death.

She saw, briefly, the way the world rarely stopped to salute you or admonish you, regardless of what you had or had not accomplished.

The Buffalo nipple' became a secret phrase that referred not only to this specific event, but to any misguided action that a person might perform in life out of longing or weakness or fear, or pretty much out of anything human.

I wondered whether he might ever love me, and how I might rush that love into existence.

And you should try to do what you want. We should all try to do whatever we want in life. I mean, what is the point otherwise?

He thought she might kill him accidentally or on purpose.

It's weird," she said, "the way sometimes you're in your life, but other times you're looking back at it like a spectator. It kind of goes back and forth, back and forth." "And then you die." She laughed a little. "Yes. And then you die.

He crashed quietly through the world.

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.