“ ...You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel—will they follow you over the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?”Goodman shifted in… 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? 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. Meg Wolitzer
“ Once, a few years earlier, Jules had gone to see a play at Ash’s theater, and afterward, during the “talkback,” when the audience asked questions of the playwright and of Ash, who’d directed the produ… Meg Wolitzer
“ The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like ... robotics. Just another subject that she couldn’t understand at all. Meg Wolitzer
“ 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… Meg Wolitzer
“ 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
“ Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?”“Hmm,” said Jules. “Yes. The Holocaust. Meg Wolitzer
“ There was no life Dennis burned to live except, it seemed, a life that wasn't depressed. Meg Wolitzer
“ 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
“ For while they'd stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children you closed ranks. You didn't plan… Meg Wolitzer
“ 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… Meg Wolitzer
“ But this post-college world felt different from everything that had come before it; art was still central, but now everyone had to think about making a living too, and they did so with a kind of scorn… Meg Wolitzer
“ No one had told her this would happen, that her girlishness would give way to the solid force of wifehood, motherhood. The choices available were all imperfect. If you chose to be with someone, you of… Meg Wolitzer
