263 Quotes by 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.

Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI.

So many people don’t even know what hits them when they grow up. They feel clobbered over the head the minute the first thing goes wrong, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to avoid pain at all costs. But you all know that avoiding pain is impossible. And I think having that knowledge, plus the experiences you’ve lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.

Another spell had been thrust upon her so long ago... She hadn’t been able to see it but it was real. Otherwise why would you rise up from your enclosed and well-defended self and go be with that other person? Why would you open your life, the most secret entries into yourself, to someone you didn’t really know? Who would do that unless she had to?

The present could never be held, it did not allow it.

While it’s true that some writers, when taking on love and war, find the task too big, or only succeed in one but not the other, Mengestu tracks both themes with authority and feeling.

Wasn’t one of the goals of life to comfortable in your own skin and in your own bed and on your own land? But as soon as you achieved it, you felt an immense sadness, and then you wanted to wreck everything around you, just because you could. Comfort was the best thing, and maybe the worst.

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.

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.