263 Quotes by Meg Wolitzer

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

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

For women in 1956 were always confronting boundaries, negotiations: where they could walk at night, how far they could let a man go when the two of them were alone. Men hardly seemed troubled by these things; they walked everywhere in cold, dark cities and pin-drop empty streets, and they let their hands go walking, too, and they opened their belts and then their trousers, and they never thought to themselves: I must stop this right now. I must not go any further.

Sadness, excitement, then sadness again; it all rose and fell like the sounds of skaters scuffing the floor of the rink. Hold tight! she thought, conveying this to both herself and Cory, thinking of them in bed together, and the joint effort couples had to make to be a couple, and stay a couple. If one let go, then that was it, both of them fell. Hold tight! she thought, imagining his body, and her own much smaller body against it.

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.

She knew what it was like to miss someone, for she missed Cory so continually and pressingly that the feeling was like its own shattering bass vibrating through her, and he was only 110 miles away at Princeton, not across the world.

The only option for a creative person was constant motion – a lifetime of busy whirligigging in a generally forward direction, until you couldn’t do it any longer.

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.

But you never knew what went on inside someone else; how, over time, a thought could become an obsession, and a new shell could form and harden around it.