Quotes from Meg Wolitzer

Part of the beauty of love was that you didn't need to explain it to anyone else. You could refuse to explain. With love, apparently you didn't necessarily feel the need to explain anything at all.

Our relationship was like one of those YouTube videos of a flower frowning in speeded-up motion. All of the sudden we were in love.

And then he perceived her politeness or kindness or even her vague responsiveness as interest,

When women got into positions of power, they calibrated and recalibrated tenderness and strength, modulating and correcting. Power and love didn't often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go.

Marriage, I don't think, is like that. It's something else. It's a thing in which you get to see your closest friend become more of who she already is.

Maybe the secret truth about death is that dead people are whisked away from their current lives and forced to live somewhere else far away—a process similar to reincarnation but taking place not in the future but now. A sort of mortality-based witness protection program. And if you found them they would look the same as they always had. If only you knew where to find them. If only you knew where to look.

This was the world they were meant to enter: a world of fuckers.

She read with "abandon," it would probably be called, though when you read a book you didn't abandon anything; instead, you marshaled it all.

After all, you could use your outside voice and scream your head off, but sometimes it didn't seem as if the screaming was being heard.

Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever thought you would.

Having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children, you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations.

So many people don't even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you've lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

Men give women the power that they themselves don't want.

There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed.

Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate. They could be strong and powerful, all the while keeping their integrity and decency.

It was exhausting being a schizophrenic, which he was still convinced he was.

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need. And maybe the world does not actually need to see you,

If Jules or Ash needed to see each other, then the two husbands stepped aside. It almost seemed gratifying to the men to step aside in those moments, remembering what women could have together that men rarely could.

Everything you do, it'll all feel really slow for a long time. But looking back, much later, it will have seemed like it was fast.

Yeah, you were lucky you got to come here when you did. But what was most exciting about it when you were here was the fact that you were young. That was the best part.

What are you asking me exactly?' Gudrun said. 'Why do I think the problems between the men and women of the world are the way they are today? You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel- will they follow you the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?' Goodman shifted in discomfort. 'Something like that,' he said. 'Yes,' said the counselor in a suddenly plangent voice. 'Always they will be acing.

Belzhar este singurul mod în care fiecare dintre noi poate avea ceea ce î?i dore?te. Singurul mod în care putem ob?ine din nou lucrul pe care l-am pierdut.

Toat? lumea, continu? ea, privind în jur spre noi, are ceva de spus. Dar nu toat? lumea poate suporta s? o spun?. Treaba voastr? e s? g?si?i o modalitate.

My job does not define me.