Meg Wolitzer Quotes & Sayings

This was a time of life, she understood, in which you might not know what you were, but that was all right. You judged people not on their success - almost no one they knew was successful at age twenty-two, and no one had a nice apartment, owned anything of value, dressed in expensive clothes, or had any interest in making money - but on their appeal. The time period between the ages of, roughly, twenty to thirty was often amazingly fertile. Great work might get done during this ten-year slice of time. Just out of college, they were geraing up, ambitious not in a calculating way, but simply eager, not yet tired. — Meg Wolitzer

you sometimes feel totally unready for them, or even that they're — 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

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

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

No one ever told you that in moment of crisis, family was allowed to trump friendship. — Meg Wolitzer

New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else ... before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them. — Meg Wolitzer

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it. — 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

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

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

We are all here, on this earth for only one go around. And everyone thinks their purpose is to just find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is to find what other people need. — Meg Wolitzer

People could not get enough of what they had lost, even if they no longer wanted it. — Meg Wolitzer

it was always slightly off when everyone was in a couple except for one person. the entire group tended to single that person out, as if to try and make him feel better in his aloneness, as though it were an unnatural state. — Meg Wolitzer

He was like a long beaker in chemistry class, and the top was always bubbling over because some interesting process was taking place inside — Meg Wolitzer

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

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

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

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

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 — Meg Wolitzer

But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place. — Meg Wolitzer

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. — 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'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

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

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

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. — 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

But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly. — Meg Wolitzer

High-fiving one another without evident irony. — 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

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

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

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. — Meg Wolitzer

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. — Meg Wolitzer

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

Sometimes a mindfuck was a satisfying and productive fuck after all. — Meg Wolitzer

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

'Charlotte's Web,' which I read sitting on my mother's lap, was the most emotional experience: that was when I made the leap from seeing how to untangle words to realizing how books both contain and convey strong feelings. — 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

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

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

You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off gallery. Everyone would come see it, and they would treat the wife with unctuous respect. Her photographs of celebrities without makeup, and seascapes, and street people, would be enormous, as though size and great equipment could make up for whatever else was missing. — 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

Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too. — Meg Wolitzer

I really love Scrabble. I played it with my mother growing up. We took it everywhere with us. We didn't know then about the two letter words. Who knew that AA, or more controversially, ZA, or QI were words? We were a games family generally. — Meg Wolitzer

But of course people were different, she remembered; they were allowed to be different. — Meg Wolitzer

I want to not think so much about what I want, and what I missed out on. I want to think about other things - other people, in other places even. I am so tired of all the little ironic in-jokes, and reciting lines from TV shows and movies and books. Everything from the . . . circumscribed world. I want an uncircumscribed world. — Meg Wolitzer

I've been waiting for someone to sign the permission slip for me to write about sex. In the meantime, I've written about sex in all my books anyway. — Meg Wolitzer

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

What was it about needy girls? Jules wondered. They felt like they had the right to be needy, because they knew that other people would be interested in - although annoyed at - their needs. ... They got all the attention. Boys turned their focus toward them, and messy situations results. — 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

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

I want an uncircumscribed world. — Meg Wolitzer

The way Susannah sings 'The Wind Will Carry Us' is so sad," he murmured.
"Yeah, it really is."
"It makes me think of the way people devote their lives to each other, and then one of them just leaves, or even dies."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," said Jules, who had never understood those lyrics, in particular how a single wind could carry two people apart. "I know this sounds picky, but wouldn't the wind carry them together?" she asked. "It's one breeze. It just blows one way, not two."
"Huh. Let me think about it." He thought briefly. "You're right. It doesn't make sense. But still, it's very melancholy. — 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

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

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. — Meg Wolitzer

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. — Meg Wolitzer

We each have only one voice. And the world is so loud. Sometimes I think that the quiet ones have figured out that the best way to get other people's attention is not to shout, but to whisper. Which makes everyone listen a little harder. — 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

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

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

But the loss of possibilities was always undeniably painful. — 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

Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story. — 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

It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life. — 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

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 — Meg Wolitzer

The students lurked on the edges of their teachers' lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory. — Meg Wolitzer

For me, a novel relying too heavily on a single idea might be a dry, deadly thing unless it possesses an animating force. — Meg Wolitzer

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

illustrations of anthropomorphic piles of resin with dialogue bubbles above them: "Hello there, I'm Frankincense. Well, technically I'm Frankincense's monster, but everyone gets that wrong." One — Meg Wolitzer

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. — 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

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

You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel - will they follow you over 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 aching. I wish I could tell you something else, but I wouldn't be telling the truth. My wise and gentle friends, this is the way it will be from now on."
No one could say anything. "We are so, so fucked," Jules finally said ... — Meg Wolitzer

Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit. — Meg Wolitzer

The past is so tenacious. — Meg Wolitzer

Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 love between a brother and sister just over a year apart in age held fast. It wasn't twinship, and it wasn't romance, but it was more like a passionate loyalty to a dying brand. — Meg Wolitzer

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

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

I have never been much of a researcher — 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

Stellar Plains, New Jersey, was a town that got mentioned whenever there was an article called "The Fifty Most Livable Suburbs in America." Unlike most suburbs, this one was considered progressive. Though the turnpike that ran through it was punctuated by carpet-remnant outlets and tire wholesalers, and even an unsettling, windowless store no one had ever been to, advertising DVDS AND CHINESE SPECIALTY ITEMS, Main Street was quaint and New Englandy, with a cosmopolitan slant. There was an excellent bookstore, Chapter and Verse, at a moment when bookstores around the country were making way for cell-phone stores. — Meg Wolitzer

Ethan Figman, thick bodied, unusually ugly, his features appearing a little bit flattened, as if pressed against a mime's invisible glass wall, sat with his mouth slack and a record album in his lap. — Meg Wolitzer