Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever though you would.

She clung marsupially,

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

It seemed so unlikely, but then again, so did many things in life.

I'm aware that New York is a toilet bowl–but an expensive porcelain one.

Now, deep into the Reagan years, you should still feel the sad spillover from that quaintly vanished era, and you could go with your best friend to this friendly sex toy store located in an anonymous office building, and stand together, silently shaking with laughter, both teenaged and fully grown all at once, knowing that you would never have to choose between those different states of maturity, because you contained them both inside yourselves.

He didn't feel the need to have his life figured out. But the truth was that he didn't want to deal with it.

The summits were about ambitious topics, such as, recently, leadership—leadership being something that everyone now wanted, as if the world could be made up entirely of leaders and no followers, the way children might crave an all-fireman, all-ballerina society.

Jonah was a skeptic, the way all decent scientists were, but his skepticism was outmaneuvered by the good feelings that he now connected with being here among these people. This was what a family felt like; this was what a family was.

Ethan, looking at Jules, seemed to have fixed himself upon her the way people fixed themselves upon the Messiah. Jonah could almost see the ragged edges of light that Ethan certainly saw around her–the coronal fringe light that was sometimes created by diligent, applied love.

You're all equipped for the world, for adulthood, in a way that most people aren't," she continues. "So many people don't even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

When I learned to read, it changed everything.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you.

It's like we kept trying to use the same rules," Greer said, "and these people kept saying to us, 'Don't you get it? I will not live by your rules.'" She took a breath. "They always get to set the terms. I mean, they just come in and set them. They don't ask, they just do it. It's still true.

On Greer's first Friday night at Ryland, from along the dormitory halls came the ambient roar of a collective social life forming, as if there were a generator somewhere deep in the building

Loveless, we lay together.

I can't bear the idea of looking deeply. Because you inevitably turn up horrible things.

Jules had had five sessions with a disheveled social worker named Melinda, who was as kind as the kindest mother, nodding in sympathy while Jules railed against the stupidity of college life. Later, she would barely remember what Melinda had said to her, but at the time her presence had been soothing and necessary,

You get used to whatever you get.

I don't know if I love him. I'm stubborn about my love, stingy about it. It comes and goes at all the wrong times.

I know I still cause harm, probably a ton of it no matter what I do. And it kills me, it just kills me, that maybe the best you can ever do is cause less harm. But there you have it.

Later on, when it wasn't just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there - your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were - both exhausted and frightened Greer.

She sometimes said, "I don't know," even when she did know. What she meant was that it was more comfortable to stay in vagueness than to leave it.

Greer, Zee, and Chloe were an unlikely trio, but she had heard this was typical of social life in the first weeks of college. People who had nothing in common were briefly and emotionally joined, like the members of a jury or the survivors of a plane crash