Meg Wolitzer Quotes

Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star ...

Cilantro was briefly everywhere, creating miniflurries of conversation about whether or not you liked cilantro, which invariably included someone in the room saying, I can't stand cilantro. It tastes like soap.

Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking.

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. But girls, at least while they're still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while. Seem to get the attention.

strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit

Crema Seamans," Ethan repeated thoughtfully. "It's like a soup made from ... various semens. A medley of semens. It's a flavour of Campbell's soup that got discontinued immediately."
"Stop it, Ethan, you're being totally graphic," said Cathy Kiplinger.
"Well, he is a graphic artist," said Goodman.

Love transcended breath, eczema, fear of sex, and an imbalance in physical appearance. If love was real, then these bodily, human details could seem insignificant.

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.

Maybe she had "no more books left inside her," as people often sorrowfully say about writers, envisioning the imagination as a big pantry, either well stocked with goods or else wartime-empty.

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.

...age sixty-eight and still wanting love to exist in a pure column of light, still convinced that it could.

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.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

It's basically my fear about what happens when you leave a room. Everyone says the thing about you that you really can't bear.

Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it.

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

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.

But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.

To be anorexic ... she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.

Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say. We were all looking for our voice.

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.

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.

Does [your music] have to be a job? And as for your actual job ... do you have to think of [it] as a consolation prize? ... What if you just *played*? Isn't it possible you'd also like your job more, because you wouldn't think of it as something that's secretly had to replace this other thing?

Having clients still seemed a little unnatural, though; it made Jules feel that she was a businessperson, someone in, say, consulting, that vague field that she'd never really understood, though over the years through Ethan and Ash, she and Dennis had met people who made their livings this way. No one wanted to be a patient anymore; everyone wanted to be a client. More to the point, everyone wanted to be a consultant.

Books light the fire - whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

Then it wouldn't be long before they all found themselves shocked and sad to be fully grown into their thicker, finalized adult selves with almost no chance for reinvention.

In 'The Interestings' I wanted to write about what happens to talent over time. In some people talent blooms, in others it falls away.

Maybe googling people kills them ... You keep looking them up to see where they are, until one day you look them up and they're dead.

I have never been much of a researcher

Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

Nothing. That was a nostalgia kiss," he said. "It's sepia colored. People in that kiss are . . . wearing stovepipe hats . . . and children are rolling hoops down the street, and eating penny candy.

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.

Sometimes you think people will be around forever, and then you lose them with no warning at all.

Now she felt as if she were dully humming with an unpleasant, low-grade drunkenness.

Twitter. You know what it is? Termites with microphones.

She understood that it had never just been about talent: it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash's father hadn't encouraged him, but it really helped that Ethan had grown up in a sophisticated city, and that he had married into a wealthy family. Ash was talented, but not all that talented. This was the thing that no one said, not once. But of course it was fortunate that Ash didn't have to worry about money while trying to think about art. Her wealthy childhood had given her a head start, and now Ethan had picked up where her childhood had left off.

In a new environment, it was possible to transform.

But she also saw that the Boyds were people whose love came with added sourness - and maybe, as a result, their son had developed the capacity for unspeakable sadness, and who could blame him? Dennis and Jules had both come from families that hadn't really felt good. This they'd shared, and when they'd come together it was to make a home that did feel good, and even sometimes to say: Fuck you, disappointing families.

The past is so tenacious.

...how many of the phrases that came to mind when thinking about his own life, were somehow sea-related. Her interest had ebbed. They were both drowning in their sorrow. He had sunk lower than ever before. The vocabulary of the ocean seemed tailored to loss.

But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.

At Lincoln Center there were always Young People's Concerts, and her class had once gone to one on a Saturday field trip. She had been to concerts before, of course, but it had always been at night, and with her mother. This matinee had a very different feeling to it.( ... ) It was wintertime, and the flu was swirling through the coatrooms of all the private schools of New York. In the darkness a child coughed from time to time, and another child coughed back in response, like two dogs tied in separate yards, barking to each other to keep company throughout the night.

What does a woman have to do to be seen as a serious person?"
"Be a man, I guess," Ethan said ...

I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly.

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

Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.

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?

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

We do seem, as a culture, to fetishize the "sweep." But I know there's room for "big" short, fierce novels, and "big" solid ones.

If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you'd always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely?

Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you.

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.

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.

Writers need light. They always tell you this, as though they're parched, as though they're plants, as though the page they're working on would look completely different with a southern exposure.

Because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.

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.

When you located someone from the past online, it was like finding that person trapped behind glass in the permanent collection of a museum. You knew they were still there, and it seemed to you as if they would stay there forever.

If you hold on, if you force yourself as hard as you can to find some kind of patience in the middle of all your impatience, things can change.

You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.

Inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and the she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her glass.

And then like two people jumping off a rock into water, I guess we both fell helplessly into sleep. I'm not sure which of us gets there first.

For while they'd stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, 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. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls
even if you'd once been best friends
was now just that, outsiders. Families had their ways. You took note of how other people raised their kids, even other people you loved, and it seemed all wrong. The culture and practices of one's own family were the only way, for better or worse. Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets?

Jules told them, "I used to be a camper here myself," but she was confronted with a squeal of feedback, and even when she repeated her words, she saw that it didn't matter to them that she, a middled-aged woman with a sweater draped over her T-shirt and the kind of softened, undefined features that their mothers shared, had once been a camper here. They didn't care, or even really believe it. Because if they did believe it, then they would have had to think that one day they too would become softened and undefined.

If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.

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

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.

Everyone simply had to wait patiently in order to lose the people they loved one by one, all the while acting as if they weren't waiting for that at all.

If you're so miserable,' my daughter said delicately, 'why don't you leave him?'

Oh my darling girl, I might have said, what a good question. In her worldview, bad marriages were simply terminated, like unwanted pregnancies. She knew nothing about this subculture of women who stayed, women who couldn't logically explain their allegiances, who held tight because it was the thing they felt most comfortable doing, the thing they actually liked. she didn't understand the luxury of the familiar, the known: the same hump of back poking up under the cover in bed, the hair tufting in the ear. The husband. A figure you never strove toward, never work yourself up over, but simply lived beside season upon season, which started building up like bricks spread thick with sloppy mortar. A marriage wall would rise up between the two of you, a marriage bed, and you would lie in it gratefully.

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.

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.

You're telling me that because of the Internet, and the availability of every experience, every whim, every tool, sudden everyone's an artist? But here's the thing: if everyone's an artist, then no one is.

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.

It was sort of like the way writers had long been pillaging all the good phrases from Shakespeare plays for the titles of their novels, so the only phrases still available meant nothing. Soon, Emmett thought, people would be writing novels called Enter, Guard.

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

But you can't say that what you learn in English class doesn't matter. That great writing doesn't make a difference. I'm

In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment.

My job does not define me.

From this day forward, because we are clearly the most interesting people who ever fucking lived," said Ethan, "because we are just so fucking compelling, our brains swollen with intellectual thoughts, let us be known as the Interestings. And let everyone who meets us fall down dead in our path from just how fucking interesting we are.

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

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.

The rest of life - that imperfect thing - waiting.

Love is when you feel, like, oh, oh, my heart hurts...Or like when you see a dog and you feel like you have to touch its head.

The food was bad but the conversation was vigorous as they sat and talked about many of the campers

Fawn face, the expression a deer makes not when it's caught in headlights but when it catches a human looking at it in wonder. The deer looks back, acknowledging not only its own terror but its own grace, and it shows off for a moment in front of the human. It flirts.

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.

Just the act of sleeping beside someone you liked to be with. Maybe that was love.

I think there are two kinds of feminists. The famous ones, and everyone else. Everyone else, all the people who just quietly go and do what they're supposed to do, and don't get a lot of credit for it, and don't have someone out there every day telling them they're doing an awesome job.

Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.

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.

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

I want an uncircumscribed world.

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.

All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the disinterested parents.

Like everyone we knew, we did what we could to protest the war. We signed, and we worked, and we brought our children with us to storefront offices to make calls and type letters. We used mimeographs, the purple ink getting all over us, the place smelling like a schoolroom, and we headed down to D.C. in a long, fossilized traffic jam of cars. The children cried in the backseat, and we pushed them on the Mall in strollers while they begged for juice, their faces blazing with heat, and Joe was among the writers who stood up and screamed into screechy, inadequate mikes.

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.

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

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.

I've always had a fear of being small and ordinary. How can I just have this one life?