Top 150 Meg Wolitzer Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Meg Wolitzer

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

— Meg Wolitzer

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

— Meg Wolitzer

106. “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

107. “If you want more to do,” said Kim, “then do more. That’s the rule of thumb in any workplace.”

— Meg Wolitzer

108. “Words matter. All semester, we were looking for the words to say what we needed to say. We were all looking for our voice.”

— Meg Wolitzer

109. “Language only felt infinite; instead, everyone swam through surprisingly narrow channels when they spoke or wrote.”

— Meg Wolitzer

110. “No, not just the visual. There’s the emotional part too. There’s that line Faulkner said, about how you don’t love because. You love despite.”

— Meg Wolitzer

111. “It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days.”

— Meg Wolitzer

112. “You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts.”

— Meg Wolitzer

113. “Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly.”

— Meg Wolitzer

114. “She became who she had been meant to be.”

— Meg Wolitzer

115. “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

116. “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

117. “I might have things to look forward to again, things I can’t even imagine yet.”

— Meg Wolitzer

118. “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

119. “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

120. “A child just wants to love her parents and to be loved, and it seems like it should be simple to do that, but sometimes it’s not.”

— Meg Wolitzer

121. “Why are we so hard on ourselves?” asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it’s not that I’m so hard on myself exactly, it’s that I’ve learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own.”

— Meg Wolitzer

122. “There are some people who have such a strong effect on you, even if you’ve spent very little time with them, that they become embossed inside you, and any hint of them, any casual mention, creates a sudden stir in you.”

— Meg Wolitzer

123. “Every marriage is just two people striking a bargain,” he went on in a softer tone. “I traded, you traded. So maybe it wasn’t even.”

— Meg Wolitzer

124. “The human face had too possibilities, and they just kept coming in a fast-moving slide show, one after another.”

— Meg Wolitzer

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “She had seen that look on the faces of lovers in restaurants, on the secret: a secret, meaningful glance exchanged between two people. There seemed to be a conspiracy of passion in the world.”

— Meg Wolitzer

129. “I’ve decided that there should be a national holiday once a year, when grown children have to let their parents tuck them in one more time.”

— Meg Wolitzer

130. “Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate. They could be strong and powerful, all the while keeping their integrity and decency.”

— Meg Wolitzer

131. “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

132. “Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.”

— Meg Wolitzer

133. “After you slept with a woman, she took away with her a small hunk of you. It wasn’t bad, as long as the relationship went on. It was something you didn’t mind giving up, because it would always be close by. It was only when things ended that you really felt the loss.”

— Meg Wolitzer

134. “Was this the epiphany of adult life, that it actually wasn’t exciting and vast in possibilities, but was in fact as enclosed and proscribed as childhood?”

— Meg Wolitzer

135. “It did not make Helen feel worse, though, as she had thought it might. It occupied her; it gave her a project to work on. She and Ray had shared almost nothing in years. Grief didn’t count, because in a way it was nothing; there wasn’t anything in it to hold on to, just wide-open empty space.”

— Meg Wolitzer

136. “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

137. “Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life, and this one is hers.”

— Meg Wolitzer

138. “The idea that something had been done to you seemed to implicate you, even though no one said it did, making your body – which usually lived in darkness beneath your clothing – suddenly live in light. Forever, if someone found out, you would be a person with a body that had been violated, breached. Also, forever you would be a person with a body that was visible and imaginable.”

— Meg Wolitzer

139. “In the old days of Take Back the Night, you could march with other women and feel that all the rapists of the world were small and powerless.”

— Meg Wolitzer

140. “After all, you could use your outside voice and scream your head off, but sometimes it didn’t seem as if the screaming was being heard.”

— Meg Wolitzer

141. “Sometimes you had to let go of your convictions, or at least loosen them far more than you ever though you would.”

— Meg Wolitzer

142. “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,” Ash said. “But girls, at least while they’re still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while.”

— Meg Wolitzer

143. “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

144. “Walking into someone’s house was like entering their body. You saw what they were made of, and what they had been stewing in all this time.”

— Meg Wolitzer

145. “It wasn’t easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you.”

— Meg Wolitzer

146. “There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn’t depressed.”

— Meg Wolitzer

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

— Meg Wolitzer

148. “What if she’d turned down the lightly flung invitation and went about her life, thudding obliviously along like a drunk person, a blind person, a moron, someone who thinks that the small packet of happiness she carries is enough.”

— Meg Wolitzer

149. “And didn’t it always go like that – body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”

— Meg Wolitzer

150. “If Jules or Ash needed to see each other, then the two husbands stepped aside. It almost seemed gratifying to the men to step aside in those moments, remembering what women could have together that men rarely could.”

— Meg Wolitzer