Meg Wolitzer

“But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“You stayed around your children as long as you could, inhaling the ambient gold shavings of their childhood, and at the last minute you tried to see them off into life and hoped that the little piece of time you’d given them was enough to prevent them from one day feeling lonely and afraid and hopeless. You wouldn’t know the outcome for a long time.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Ten-Year Nap

“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.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“But clearly life took people and shook them around until finally they were unrecognizable even to those who had once known them well. Still, there was power in once having known someone.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“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.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“We're talking about the novel, right? But maybe we're not. We're talking about ourselves. And I guess that's what can start to happen when you talk about a book.”
― Meg Wolitzer, Belzhar

“Everyone,” she continues, looking around at all of us, “has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.”
― Meg Wolitzer, Belzhar

“...he’s infuriated that his e-reader allows him to only know the percentage of a book he’s read, not the number of pages. This, he thinks, is 92 percent stupid.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“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.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling

“Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.” And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

“Ordinary father-daughter love had a charge to it that generally was both permitted and indulged. There was just something so beautiful about the big father complementing the tiny girl. Bigness and tininess together at last – yet the bigness would never hurt the tininess! It respected it. In a world in which big always crushes tiny, you wanted to cry at the beauty of big being kind of and worshipful of and being humbled by tiny. You couldn’t help but think of your own father as you saw your little girl with hers.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be alone, you often felt the unbearable need for another body - not necessarily for sex, but just to rub your foot, to sit across the table, to drop his things around the room in a way that was maddening but still served as a reminder that he was there.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Position

“And specialness - everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is? Most people aren't talented. So what are they supposed to do - kill themselves?”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Apparently, something can happen inside someone you love—it can just happen somehow—and like magic she thinks that she’s had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling

“After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“And I also know that pain can seem like an endless ribbon. You pull it and you pull it. You keep gathering it toward you, and as it collects, you really can’t believe that there’s something else at the end of it. Something that isn’t just more pain. But there’s always something else at the end; something at least a little different. You never know what that thing will be, but it’s there.”
― Meg Wolitzer, Belzhar

“At the podium Faith said, "Whenever I give a talk at colleges I meet young women who say, 'I'm not a feminist, but...' By which they mean, 'I don't call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure. I want to have a fair and good life. I don't want to be held back because I'm a woman.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn for money except as it allowed them to live the way they wanted to live.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“Self-preservation is as important as generosity. Because if you don't preserve yourself, keep enough for yourself, then of course you have nothing to give.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling

“Books light the fire—whether it’s a book that’s already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.”
― Meg Wolitzer, Belzhar

“Well," said Ash, and she got out of her own bed and came to sit beside Jules. "I've always sort of felt that you prepare yourself over the course of your whole life for the big moments, you know? But when they happen, you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're not what you thought. And that's what makes them strange. The reality is really different from the fantasy.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

“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 the Stop & 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.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

“Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star...”
― Meg Wolitzer