Quotes from The Ten-Year Nap

Meg Wolitzer ·  351 pages

Rating: (7.8K votes)


“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


About the author

Meg Wolitzer
Born place: in Long Island, New York, The United States
Born date May 28, 1959
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“What was the point in satin and lace if it didn't make a man struggle to speak?”
― Alexandra Ivy, quote from Embrace The Darkness


“He was in a beastly hole. But decency demanded that he shouldn't act in panic. He had a mechanical, normal panic that made him divest himself of money. Gentlemen don't earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don't do anything. They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies. Money comes into them as air through petals and foliage. Thus the world is made better and brighter. And, of course, thus political life can be kept clean!... So you can't make money.”
― Ford Madox Ford, quote from Parade's End


“I spend a lot of time talking to people who disagree with me – I would go so far as to say that it’s my favourite leisure activity – and repeatedly I meet individuals who are eager to share their views on science despite the fact that they have never done an experiment. They have never tested an idea for themselves, using their own hands; or seen the results of that test, using their own eyes; and they have never thought carefully about what those results mean for the idea they are testing, using their own brain. To these people ‘science’ is a monolith, a mystery, and an authority, rather than a method.”
― Ben Goldacre, quote from Bad Science


“There will be three, kin of your kin..." Jayfeather's voice shook as he wondered if he could possibly be right. "Cloudtail is Firestar's kin, Whitewing is Cloudtail's daughter, and now Dovekit and Ivykit...Don't you see? The prophecy isn't over! We aren't the only kin of Firestar's kin. It doesn't matter which of Whitewing's kits is the one. There are still three of us!

[Jayfeather]”
― Erin Hunter, quote from Sunrise


“All of us are a culmination of vital parts of our parents and their pasts. A vital part of the circumstances we were raised with. Everything that happens to us, good and bad, leaves a lasting impression in our souls. You take one part of that out, and you can completely rewrite something crucial about us. By and large, we're not shaped by the big things. It's the little day to day moments that make us who we are. Who we're going to be."
His head was pounding from trying to digest all of this.
"I'm so overwhelmed."
"Most of us are, Nick. Even though we look calm and peaceful on the outside, most of us are barely hanging on by our fingernails.”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Invincible


Interesting books

A Walk to Remember
(568.7K)
A Walk to Remember
by Nicholas Sparks
Insurgent
(1M)
Insurgent
by Veronica Roth
The Last Olympian
(531.8K)
The Last Olympian
by Rick Riordan
It
(568.7K)
It
by Stephen King
Love in the Time of Cholera
(338.1K)
Love in the Time of...
by Gabriel García Márquez
The Count of Monte Cristo
(634.8K)
The Count of Monte C...
by Alexandre Dumas

About BookQuoters

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.