Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

He was like a long beaker in chemistry class, and the top was always bubbling over because some interesting process was taking place inside

Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.

Your personal history of pain, by the time you reached the age of forty, was supposedto have been folded thoroughly into the batter of the self, so that you barely needed to acknowledge it anymore.

I might have things to look forward to again, things I can't even imagine yet.

When do I stop? When I'm tewnty-five? Thirty? Thirty-five? Forty? Or right this minute? Nobody tell s you how long you should keep doing something before you give up forever.

First novels were always at least somewhat autobiographical,

The world is so enormous, but if you have places where they know what you like to drink, then all is well.

I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections.

No, of course not. I just feel content," she said carefully. "That's an old person's word," said Ethan.

Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.

When you lived a certain kind of life, pushed along by good colleges and internships and jobs and a shared, tranquil neighborhood and a world of privilege in which your child overlapped, you were inevitably part of a long chain of connections. All of them could help one another; the possibilities were there if they wanted them, though many of them didn't seem to want them anymore, or maybe they had somehow forgotten they had once wanted them.

Friendship was a thing of extraordinary value, ever since it had become clear to both of them that lovers never lasted, and that families were the traps you walked into on major holidays and emerged from the next day, stuffed with carbohydrates and seething.

The present could never be held, it did not allow it.

She missed his young, vulnerable, ownable self. You never knew when you were lifting your child for the last time; it might seem like just a regular time, when it was taking place, but later, looking back, it would turn out to have been the last.

But sometimes the way to get involved is to just live your life and be yourself with all your values intact.

The only option for a creative person was constant motion—a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn't do it any longer.

She used to be really dynamic and exciting and filled with promise, but she's become this ordinary sort of boring person...I always thought it was the saddest and most devastating ending. How you could have these enormous dreams that never get met. How without knowing it you could just make yourself smaller over time. I don't want that to happen to me.

Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness.

to find out what another human being feels, a person who isn't you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That's what writing is supposed to do.

sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all.

To commit to actual things composed of wood and metal and fabric was to make real the vagueness and unreality of love.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives.

No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship.

What was it about needy girls? Jules wondered. They felt like they had the right to be needy, because they knew that other people would be interested in—although annoyed at—their needs. … They got all the attention. Boys turned their focus toward them, and messy situations results.