Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

And didn't it always go like that - body parts not quite lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

In the past, people appreciated artwork. Now artwork appreciates?

Some things just can't be explained, ever, and your brain could burst if you think about them too hard.

He was insinuating, he was always around, he was like a cat in a bookstore window, letting his tail slowly drape across all the books as he wandered by.

She was bitter and difficult, a once-good-looking woman who had gotten a little too heavy and shouldered too much resentment to attract many people anymore, and yet Professor Castleman was taken with her. Maybe he was repelled by her, too, but still he was attracted. She was gifted; her gifts were strange and discomforting and sort of male.

How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself

The problem is that I love men passionately, even though they don't deserve it.

They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else. A word might land in a certain way; or maybe not even a word. Maybe a gesture, or a moment of listening.

There's only a handful of women who get anywhere. Short story writers, mostly, as if maybe women are somehow more acceptable in miniature.

Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say: You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!

Dennis had fallen asleep before Jules got home, though he denied it in that strange way that people often deny they've been sleeping.

they talked day and night, as though inside them an endless scroll of paper were unraveling out through the mouth.

Throw yourself into new experiences... Why not try to use your 'outside voice'? You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

Numbness would, it turned out. She found that through real concentration she could close out certain thoughts and focus only on the practical things. Parting her hair before the bathroom mirror, all she thought about was evenness, getting it just right. In geometry class she held her compass and swiveled it carefully over the page. A perfect arc formed, a useless bridge

here I was: shouting compliments about Joe through the mayonnaise-colored living room of my childhood and hoping I would start to believe them.

The men's prose spread out on the page, sprawled leisurely like someone having a bath and a shave and then they talked day and night, as though inside them an endless scroll of paper were unraveling out through the mouth.

Only when those fathers were not on the premises could they be elevated and deified.

It was as though there were a box I kept under a bed and pulled out only once in a while, and in this box were crammed Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers and now Lee the journalist. If I opened the lid, their heads would pop out like jack-in-the-box clowns on springs, mocking me, reminding me that they existed, that women could occasionally become important writers with formidable careers, and that maybe I could have done it if I'd tried.

Male novelists made up words in their fiction: "phallomaterialism"; "ero-tectonics.

know you have other things to think about, other people who want your time, which I know you probably have to dole out really, really carefully, preserving yourself. Self-preservation is as important as generosity.

What sort of man would stay with her and not be threatened by her excesses, her rage, her spirit, her skill? Who was he, this phantom, unthreatened husband who was still attractive and strong himself? Maybe he lived under a rock somewhere, sliding out once in a while to celebrate the big ideas of his brilliant wife, before returning to the shadows.

But sometimes the way to get involved is to just live your life and be yourself with all your values intact. And by just being you, it'll happen. Maybe not in big ways, but it'll happen.

as we sat in a dining room drinking martinis from big frozen glasses whose shape reminded me of the inverted, shellacked straw hats of the cyclo drivers.

Because if you don't preserve yourself, keep enough for yourself, then of course you have nothing to give.