Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

Bone didn't know yet that the men who own the world don't get to do that by being magnanimous and overly interested in other people. They get to do it by taking care of themselves along the way. They stoke the fire of their own reputations, and sometimes other people come by, asking: What's that you're doing there? Oh, stoking the fire of my reputation. Can I help? Certainly. Go get some wood.

Was that true? Could a woman writer simply appear in the world, unconcerned about her stature, or whether she'd be laughed at or ignored?

She sang along with them, her voice coming out in a loud quaver. But it didn't matter that you quavered; it only mattered that you made yourself heard.

What if talent wasn't simply meaningless, but was actually a liability? Did he like her more because she was a bad writer? Did it make him feel safe sliding along the body of a woman who would never be a great challenge to him? Yes, it 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.

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 supervisors of a plane crash. Chloe took them across West Quad, and then they looped around behind the fortress of the Metzger Library, which was all lit up and poignantly empty, like a 24-hour supermarket in the middle of the night.

Women were allowed to tell each other what they felt without holding back. Women could now say, "I love you," without any hesitation or discomfort or a sense that there were sexual overtones between them, even if one of them was gay.

you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're

illustrations of anthropomorphic piles of resin with dialogue bubbles above them: "Hello there, I'm Frankincense. Well, technically I'm Frankincense's monster, but everyone gets that wrong." One

I don't know,' Greer said to Zee, aware of a kind of familiar vagueness sweeping around her. 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.

She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she'd first suspected that her parents weren't all that interested in her.

strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit

Jonah couldn't tell her that what he wanted now, more than anything, was to fall asleep beside her. No touching, no kissing, no stimulation. No sensation, no consciousness. Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.

all the stars out there, she thought, and all the worlds those stars existed in; and all the non-stars too, the strivers, everyone worried about their own careers, their own trajectories, how it looked, what it meant, what other people thought of them. It was just too much to take in; it was just so sickening and unnecessary. Leave success and fame and money and an extraordinary

Most of the time I'm like, 'Why do I have to share a gender with you, you piece of shit?' It's like when you have a bad relative who has the same last name.

The two Lucys are going to go to the movies with Eli and I," Robby said, "Great. And you have English teachers for parents.

In this, where nurses paced the floor like night watchmen in the bleak hours, lay fragmented women.

it was always slightly off when everyone was in a couple except for one person. the entire group tended to single that person out, as if to try and make him feel better in his aloneness, as though it were an unnatural state.

In this room, where nurses paced the floor like night watchmen in the bleak hours, lay fragmented women.

Everybody's grown-up, everybody's old, and the normal rules do apply.

all the girls had secretly sprung up in height, even as the teachers and mothers had gotten squashed and lost height and calcium, their bones ground down with an invisible pestle.

when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.

She had gotten an old cassette of the music that day from the school library, which still carried a small and arbitrary assortment located in a drawer in the back marked CASSETTES—which at this point in time might have been marked SCRIMSHAW.

she would be able to tend their son with a mother's warrior love.