Top 150 Meg Wolitzer Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I’m beginning to think I feel too much. The feelings flood into me like so much water, and I am helpless against the onslaught.”

— Meg Wolitzer

52. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

53. “Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.”

— Meg Wolitzer

54. “The mind plays tricks on itself in order to stay in one piece.”

— Meg Wolitzer

55. “If you ever wanted to get an accurate picture of who you are, Greer thought years later, all you had to do was look at everything you’d Googled over the past twenty-four hours. Most people would be appalled to see themselves with this kind of clarity.”

— Meg Wolitzer

56. “What do I need to do to get you to go to sleep? Hit you over the head with a frying pan?”

— Meg Wolitzer

57. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

58. “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?”

— Meg Wolitzer

59. “The thing that really gets me,” she said, “is that the worst kind of man, the kind that you would never allow yourself to be alone with, because you would know he was a danger to you, was left alone with all of us.”

— Meg Wolitzer

60. “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

61. “Our relationship was like one of those YouTube videos of a flower frowning in speeded-up motion. All of the sudden we were in love.”

— Meg Wolitzer

62. “Maybe that was what it was like to be a writer: Even with the eyes closed, you could see.”

— Meg Wolitzer

63. “All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies.”

— Meg Wolitzer

64. “Yeah, you were lucky you got to come here when you did. But what was most exciting about it when you were here was the fact that you were young. That was the best part.”

— Meg Wolitzer

65. “Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.”

— Meg Wolitzer

66. “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

67. “Friendship was a thing of extraordinary value, ever since it had become clear to both of them that lovers never lasted, and that families were the traps you walked into on major holidays and emerged from the next day, stuffed with carbohydrates and seething.”

— Meg Wolitzer

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

71. “Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit.”

— Meg Wolitzer

72. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

73. “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

74. “I have never been much of a researcher.”

— Meg Wolitzer

75. “We’re talking about the novel, right? But maybe we’re not. We’re talking about ourselves. And I guess that’s what can start to happen when you talk about a book.”

— Meg Wolitzer

76. “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

77. “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

78. “But sometimes the way to get involved is to just live your life and be yourself with all your values intact.”

— Meg Wolitzer

79. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

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

— Meg Wolitzer

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

— Meg Wolitzer

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

— Meg Wolitzer

83. “People did what they could, as powerfully as they could, until they couldn’t do it anymore. There wasn’t much time.”

— Meg Wolitzer

84. “She missed his young, vulnerable, ownable self. You never knew when you were lifting your child for the last time; it might seem like just a regular time, when it was taking place, but later, looking back, it would turn out to have been the last.”

— Meg Wolitzer

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

88. “Both my mother and I have close groups of friends that include other writers, and these friendships are very important to us.”

— Meg Wolitzer

89. “In life, no one gives you credit for effort.”

— Meg Wolitzer

90. “I think having the knowledge, plus the experiences you’ve lived through, make you definitely not fragile. They make you brave.”

— Meg Wolitzer

91. “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

92. “To commit to actual things composed of wood and metal and fabric was to make real the vagueness and unreality of love.”

— Meg Wolitzer

93. “And you don’t always have to feel the compulsion to keep striving toward something for the sake of striving. No one will think less of you. There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.”

— Meg Wolitzer

94. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

95. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

96. “Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn’t try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren’t being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.”

— Meg Wolitzer

97. “I’ve always had a fear of being small and ordinary.”

— Meg Wolitzer

98. “Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.”

— Meg Wolitzer

99. “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.”

— Meg Wolitzer

100. “This post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it...”

— Meg Wolitzer