Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?" "Hmm," said Jules. "Yes. The Holocaust.

The past is so tenacious.

Everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren't waiting for that at all.

People's marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand.

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated. The city at that moment was not a place that anyone would remember with nostalgia, except for the fact that in the midst of all this, if you played it right, your money could double, and you could buy a big apartment with triple-glazed windows that overlooked the chaos.

I think there are two kinds of feminists. The famous ones, and everyone else. Everyone else, all the people who just quietly go and do what they're supposed to do, and don't get a lot of credit for it, and don't have someone out there every day telling them they're doing an awesome job.

I think that's what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don't feel we're allowed to be.

All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies.

oh boo hoo , everyone's life was hard, and if you'd survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough.

Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story.

For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves: I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.

interrupted by a couple of familiar shrieks that you might hear in a restaurant when there's a large group of women at a table. Everyone here knew that shriek, which signaled the happiness of women spending time together.

Sisterhood," she said, "is about being together with other women in a cause that allows all women to make the individual choices they want. Because as long as women are separate from one another, organized around competition—like in a children's game where only one person gets to be the princess—then it will be the rare woman who is not in the end narrowed and limited by our society's idea of what a woman should be.

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure.

Inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and the she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her glass.

She knew what it was like to miss someone, for she missed Cory so continually and pressingly that the feeling was like its own shattering bass vibrating through her, and he was only 110 miles away at Princeton, not across the world.

how many of the phrases that came to mind when thinking about his own life, were somehow sea-related. Her interest had ebbed. They were both drowning in their sorrow. He had sunk lower than ever before. The vocabulary of the ocean seemed tailored to loss.

the rest of life—that imperfect thing—waiting.

Another spell had been thrust upon her so long ago...She hadn't been able to see it but it was real. Otherwise why would you rise up from your enclosed and well-defended self and go be with that other person? Why would you open your life, the most secret entries into yourself, to someone you didn't really know? Who would do that unless she had to?

Oh tragedy, oh tragedy, the boy said to himself, but he was smiling a little. Oh joy, oh joy. Hearts and stars exploded in the darkness above their heads.

Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.

Love is when you feel, like, oh, oh, my heart hurts...Or like when you see a dog and you feel like you have to touch its head.

When you located someone from the past online, it was like finding that person trapped behind glass in the permanent collection of a museum. You knew they were still there, and it seemed to you as if they would stay there forever.

From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived ," said Ethan, "because we are just so fucking compelling , our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are.