Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

But you never knew what went on inside someone else; how, over time, a thought could become an obsession, and a new shell could form and harden around it.

Women in powerful positions are never safe from criticism.

If you want more to do," said Kim, "then do more. That's the rule of thumb in any workplace.

She became who she had been meant to be

But all she could feel was that he was her friend, her wonderful and gifted friend.

A child just wants to love her parents and to be loved, and it seems like it should be simple to do that, but sometimes it's not.

And it was true that if you categorized people by which Disney character they were, then Jonah would always be Bambi. Motherless, graceful, unobtrusive. Ethan--Jiminy Cricket, the annoying little conscience... just look at Ash. In the Disney hierarchy she was Snow White... He paused to wonder which Disney character Jules was, and realized that Disney did not make women or girls or woodland animals that were like her.

All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman's experience could differ so greatly from another's that you never knew who you were talking to.

Parents should be completely dull and ordinary and predictable. You want their relationship to be stable and incredibly boring, as though you would kill yourself if you had to be in that marriage." Neither

Wasn't one of the goals of life to comfortable in your own skin and in your own bed and on your own land? But as soon as you achieved it, you felt an immense sadness, and then you wanted to wreck everything around you, just because you could. Comfort was the best thing, and maybe the worst.

Power structures were always fairly easy to figure out if you took a moment to observe the people involved.

In the old days of Take Back the Night, you could march with other women and feel that all the rapists of the world were small and powerless.

Even when I can't relate on a personal level, she makes me know what she feels, and that's really something. 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.

Edie was a gorgeous, avant-garde girl back in the day when that could be a full-time occupation, but in marriage she slowly became less wild. To Manny's great disappointment, though, her domestic skills didn't rise to the fore as her sexual and artistic ones receded.

high-fiving one another without evident irony.

I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary.

But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful.

Bending Spring Ranch, Cole Valley, Colorado." "What kind of a ranch is it anyway?" Dennis had asked Jules originally when the property had been purchased. "Cattle? Dude? I wasn't really sure." "No, it's a tax ranch," she'd said. "See, they raise little tax brackets there. It's the only one of its kind in the world.

I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

I've decided that there should be a national holiday once a year, when grown children have to let their parents tuck them in one more time.

But maybe in life, she thought later, there are not only moments of strangeness but moments of knowledge, which don't appear at the time as knowledge at all

I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society," Ash said. "But girls, at least while they're still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while.

Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers.

The human face had too possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.