Meg Wolitzer quotes - page 3

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness. (Meg Wolitzer)
I have never been much of a researcher. View quote
Meg Wolitzer
Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too. View quote
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. View quote
Meg Wolitzer
Being an adult child was an awkward, inevitable position. You went about your business in the world: tooling around, giving orders, being taken seriously, but there were still these two people lurking somewhere who in a split second could reduce you to nothing. In their presence, you were a big-headed baby again, crawling instead of walking. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Meg Wolitzer
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)
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. View quote
Meg Wolitzer
It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life. View quote
Meg Wolitzer
We sometimes drive ourselves crazy with how our books will be "seen," when in fact we already know what they're about, and where our obsessions are. If we can spin those obsessions into fiction, then there's a decent chance they will be "fiction-worthy," as you call it. The idea of the "sweep of ideas" is a complicated one. View quote
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. View quote
Meg Wolitzer