“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, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.”
― Meg Wolitzer, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.”
― Meg Wolitzer, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“To be anorexic...she thought, amounted to wanting to shed yourself of some of the imperfect mosaic of pieces that made you who you were. She could understand that now for, maybe underneath that desquamated self you would locate a new version.”
― Meg Wolitzer, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“But now the world, he thought, had taken them. He knew that this could suddenly happen. One day you just woke up, and there was somewhere that you needed to be.”
― Meg Wolitzer, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“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, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“Jill told him that he just didn't understand what it meant to have been so promising your whole life and now to be so disappointing in the end.”
― Meg Wolitzer, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“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, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
“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, quote from The Ten-Year Nap
Meg Wolitzer
Born place: in Long Island, New York, The United States
Born date May 28, 1959
See more on GoodReads
“The spirit is beyond pleasure and pain; it’s outside them. They are swings of opposites. The spiritual is in the here and now. It’s not pleasure nor is it pain. It is its own substance, its own kind.”
― Belsebuub, quote from Gazing into the Eternal: Reflections upon a Deeper Purpose to Living
“It's been so long since I've been okay, I don't know what it feels like anymore.”
― Joelle Charbonneau, quote from Need
“We were where we we had never been in our lives.
Visitors--visiting even ourselves.
The bats were part of the sun's machinery,
Connected to the machinery of the flowers
By the machinery of insects. The bats' meaning
Oiled the unfailing logic of the earth.
Cosmic requirement--on the wings of a goblin.
A rebuke to our flutter of half-participation...
Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,
They knew how, and when, to detach themselves
From the love that moves the sun and other stars.”
― Ted Hughes, quote from Birthday Letters
“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Moby-Dick
“No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”
― Matthew Desmond, quote from Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
A Hope Undaunted
The Wisdom of Insecu...
Blackveil
The Ox-Bow Incident
The Wretched of the...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
