Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

We had a good marriage," he said. "I just thought it would be so much longer." Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face that aging seemed to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn't matter anymore.

He couldn't tell her that what we 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.

When you looked closely at anything, you could almost faint, Jules thought, although you had to look closely if you wanted to have any knowledge at all in life.

The love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn't twinship, and it wasn't romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand.

But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place.

They should hand out vibrators if they're going to demand so much of you that you can't find time for a private life.

The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like ... robotics. Just another subject that she couldn't understand at all.

Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.

I'm beginning to think I feel too much. The feelings flood into me like so much water, and I am helpless against the onslaught.

But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.

I guess I feel like grief is this huge part of everything," I say in a burst. "But you're supposed to act like it's not.

And the child who was happy with herself meant the parents had won the jackpot.

Are you afraid of me? I mean, I read in a book... that people are scared off by people with diseases because it reminds them of their own mortality and stuff.

The thing that really gets me," she said, "is that the worst kind of man, the kind that you would never allow yourself to be alone with, because you would know he was a danger to you, was left alone with all of us.

Because as you get older, life sort of eats away at you like battery acid, and all the things you once loved are suddenly harder to find. And when you do find them, you don't have time to enjoy them anymore, you know?

The students lurked on the edges of their teachers' lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory.

He'd had a real talent, but what was talent without confidence, self-possession, "ownership," as people said, pompously but maybe accurately.

Everyone knows how women soldier on, how women dream up blueprints, recipes, ideas for a better world, and then sometimes lose them on the way to the crib in the middle of the night, on the way to Stop and Shop, or the bath. They lose them on the way to greasing the path on which their husband and children will ride serenely through life.

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn't need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain.

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated.

But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire—whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you.

Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI.

If you ever wanted to get an accurate picture of who you are, Greer thought years later, all you had to do was look at everything you'd Googled over the past twenty-four hours. Most people would be appalled to see themselves with this kind of clarity.