Meg Wolitzer Quotes

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

Even not knowing that yet, she felt an intuitive urgency. What she wanted
and wanted now
was to be loved by someone who excited her. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

The minute you had kids 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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Jealousy was essentially "I want what you have," while envy was "I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can't have it. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

You are the only one I can trust about this, Ash said. Which was maybe just another version of what Cathy Kiplinger had said to Jules: you are weak. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

I have never been much of a researcher ~ Meg Wolitzer

If the point of drawing was to bring your work into the world so that other people could see it and sense what you'd meant to convey, then, no, Gil should not keep giving it a whirl: he should never draw anything again. No whirls. It should be illegal for Gil Wolf to possess charcoal sticks. But if the point was something else, expression or release, or a way to give private meaning to the loss of your son, your child, your boy, then yes, he should draw and draw. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She'd always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family. She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she'd first suspected that her parents weren't all that interested in her. Then she'd kept going, plowing through children's books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did. ~ Meg Wolitzer

The rest of life - that imperfect thing - waiting. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ 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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

First novels were always at least somewhat autobiographical, ~ Meg Wolitzer

...the Iraq war was the Ishtar of wars. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

...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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Why, Maddy asked herself lately, had she ever decided to have a baby? She wasn't ready for this, and neither was Peter. Very recently, it seemed, they had been staying up late and having lots of sex, and eating in a variety of cheap restaurants and going to many movies, and once even going to a tiny jewelry store on Avenue A on a Saturday night to have Maddy's nose pierced. Then, on a whim almost as casual as the nose-piercing decision, they had decided to stop using birth-control. She had taken her circular packet of pills one night, put them in an ash-tray, and ceremonially burned them, although the plastic had only curled and smoked and stank up the apartment, leaving the pills themselves intact behind their transparent bubble windows. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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? ~ Meg Wolitzer

My being a writer and playing Scrabble are connected. If I have a good writing day, I'll take a break and play online Scrabble. My favorite word as a child was 'carrion,' before I knew what it meant. I later created crossword puzzles, which was a lot about puns, and how words would create these strange, strange things. ~ Meg Wolitzer

I loved 'Belzhar' by Meg Wolitzer. ~ Kaui Hart Hemmings

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

When I wrote 'The Interestings,' I wanted to let time unspool, to give the book the feeling of time passing. I had to allow myself the freedom to move back and forth in time freely, and to trust that readers would accept this. ~ Meg Wolitzer

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated. The city at that moment was not a place that anyone would remember with nostalgia, except for the fact that in the midst of all this, if you played it right, your money could double, and you could buy a big apartment with triple-glazed windows that overlooked the chaos. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Oh tragedy, oh tragedy, the boy said to himself, but he was smiling a little. Oh joy, oh joy. Hearts and stars exploded in the darkness above their heads. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Because friend was encompassing, and here it encompassed so much, including the contradictions. ~ Meg Wolitzer

you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're ~ Meg Wolitzer

Oh boo hoo, everyone's life was hard, and if you'd survived the hardship, why write about it? Survival itself was enough. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us. ~ Meg Wolitzer

The train came, and Jules Jacobson stepped on and thought: I am the loneliest person in this subway car. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Twitter. You know what it is? Termites with microphones. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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? ~ Meg Wolitzer

The past is so tenacious. ~ Meg Wolitzer

I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I've brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It's like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It's a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that's not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here's a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That's incredibly moving to me. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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 ~ Meg Wolitzer

This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it ... ~ Meg Wolitzer

In a new environment, it was possible to transform. ~ Meg Wolitzer

My job does not define me. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Closure, that impossible thing that no one had ever experienced in life, because there always seemed to be a little aperture, a slit of light. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

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. ~ Meg Wolitzer

Being here reminded him of how hard the city had been, it's unyielding surfaces, the relentless need for more and more money just to keep yourself vaguely afloat. The city was not a place for the contemplative or the slow. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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? ~ Meg Wolitzer

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

What you knew, felt and wanted now, and the way you could love now, had a long valley of seriousness running through it that had always perhaps been there, though to a lesser extent. ~ Meg Wolitzer