Quotes from The Ten-Year Nap

“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

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Popular quotes

“La vie n'est pas assez grande pour y faire entrer tout ce que le désir peut imaginer.”
― Alessandro Baricco, quote from Oceano mare

“We live in the empiricist’s nightmare: there is a reality far beyond our perception. Our senses have failed us for millennia. Only when we mastered glass and were able to produce clear, polished lenses were we able to gaze through a microscope and finally realize the enormity of our former ignorance.”
― quote from The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature

“At the beginning of the semester, when you asked who I loved the most, an image of my mother popped in my head. When you asked me who I loved the most for the second time, it wasn’t an image of my mother. Instead, it was replaced by an image of a strawberry blonde with big, blue eyes.
It took me a long time to figure out the exact moment I fell in love with her, partly because I denied that I did until it was too late.
I fucked up so badly and did so many things wrong, to the point of no return, so I let her go. The selfless part inside of me wants to say I did the right thing, and the selfish part of me thinks I made the biggest mistake of my life. I guess the selfless side won out because, every time I look at her and see what I did, I realize I don’t deserve her.
I was never supposed to fall in love with her, but that was the best mistake of my life. I will always love her; I have ever since I purposely bumped into her in the hallway.”
― Sarah Brianne, quote from Nero

“He pushed my back against the stall door, kissing me. Edward had tried kissing me, but I'd been so shocked I'd barely had time to explore how it felt. Lucy had told me stories of shady corners and sweaty palms. But this was passionate. Wild. Something I'd never known.
"Have you kissed a girl before?" I whispered. He ran his thumb over my cheek. His eyes lingered on my lips.
"Yes," he said. I thought of Alice, her pretty blonde hair, the split lip that made her so vulnerable. But it wasn't her name he said.
"A woman at the docks in Brisbane. She didn't mean anything. I was lonely. It wasn't love." A prostitute, he meant.”
― Megan Shepherd, quote from The Madman's Daughter

“Help People Reach Their Full Potential
Catch Them Doing Something Right”
― Kenneth H. Blanchard, quote from The One Minute Manager

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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.