Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

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.

I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

Sometimes an alternative world is much better than the real one.

Plus, constantly worrying about money is *boring*. Use your brain...to be creative.

Does [your music] have to be a job? And as for your actual job...do you have to think of [it] as a consolation prize? ...What if you just *played*? Isn't it possible you'd also like your job more, because you wouldn't think of it as something that's secretly had to replace this other thing?

The train came, and Jules Jacobson stepped on and thought: I am the loneliest person in this subway car.

But I have to admit here that when he told me this story, my first, awful thought was: good material.

Even not knowing that yet, she felt an intuitive urgency. What she wanted-- and wanted now-- was to be loved by someone who excited her.

What you knew, felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had always perhaps been there, though to a lesser extent.

To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life.

And that's acceptable to you?" Faith took a second. "I always weigh it," she said. "Like with Ecuador. I'm ashamed of what happened. But those young women are free and presumably out of danger. I have to weigh that too, don't I? That's what it's about, this life. The weighing.

I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things—other people, in other places even. I am so tired of all the little ironic in-jokes, and reciting lines from TV shows and movies and books. Everything from the . . . circumscribed world. I want an uncircumscribed world.

Both beds had extra-long sheets, a weird detail of college life. After college, sheets would immediately shorten to their normal length.

You've got that extra gene, that sensitivity toward women. That unwillingness to objectify the opposite sex, isn't that what they say about you? That you invent a female character and put her in a marriage, a family, a king-sized bed in the suburbs, and yet you don't feel the need to describe . . . I don't know, her pubic hair in literary terms: 'a burnt-sienna nimbus,' or whatever, like the rest of your crowd would.

We each have only one voice, and the world is so loud. Sometimes I think that the quiet ones have figured out that the best way to get other people's attention is not to shout, but to whisper. Which makes everyone listen a little harder.

There were a couple of Joe imitators in the pile, all men, mostly young, and a trembly, single-spacing woman, probably old, who had written, beneath the title of her 100 percent unpublishable story, "Copyright, Gloria Bismarck. First North American Serial Rights. Approximately 4,213 words." Which was enough to break your heart rather than have contempt for.

Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood.

Unlike almost everyone he knew at college, Jonah was not particularly ambitious. When people inquired about his ambitions, he told them that his mother's non-acquisitive folksinger's values must have rubbed off on him, because 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 human face had too many possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.

I had a mission. To absorb everything in this world. But also to escape.

Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime's invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap.

Because friend was encompassing, and here it encompassed so much, including the contradictions.

Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously?

The Kadetskys were atheists—"lowercase a," her father always said, afraid that deification could slip into a nuance of typography.