“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
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“There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and cooly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it. The locker room became a place of torment, full of exposed male genitalia that seemed to taunt me with my failure to avoid glancing at them, for a fraction of a second that might have seemed accidental but was, I recognized, a bitter symptom of my perversion. Bursting with typical fourteen-year-old desire, I attempted to focus it in succession on the thought of every boy I knew, hoping to find some outlet for my horniness, even if it had to be perverted, secret, and doomed to disappointment. Without exception these attempts failed to produce anything but bemusement, if not actual disgust.
This crisis of self-esteem had been abruptly dispelled by the advent of Julie Lefkowitz, followed swiftly by her sister Robin, and then Sharon Horne and little Rose Fagan and Jennifer Schaeffer; but I never forgot my period of profound sexual doubt. Once in a while I would meet an enthralling man who shook, dimly but perceptibley, the foundations laid by Julie Lefkowitz, and I would wonder, just for a moment, by what whim of fate I had decided that I was not a homosexual.”
― Michael Chabon, quote from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
“now you have the body shape considered ideal to the women you seek to cultivate—delicately emaciated, with just a hint of a well-managed eating disorder.”
― Kevin Kwan, quote from China Rich Girlfriend
“He stares blankly, then leaves the room like a ghost—never truly here. I gaze at the doorway. I do not know if he means for me to follow him. It’s a choice then.
And I realize that this is no choice at all, but rather a sentence. By love or by evil, somehow I am bound to Tutankhamen. It’s not a choice any more if I will follow him, but a question of what I will do when I catch him.”
― Leah Rooper, quote from Jane Unwrapped
“It seems quite bizarre how much I loved one big bundle of all of my demons, but that may have been his core appeal. If he could embrace me, there was a chance I could become tolerable, even passable in those worlds that considered me a plague.”
― Maggie Georgiana Young, quote from Just Another Number
“Ale jest też inny prawdopodobny powód odmowy trepanacji królewskiej głowy - ryzyko powikłań po takim zabiegu było wysokie, a winnym z pewnością byłby przeprowadzający go lekarz'.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: And Other True Stories of Trauma, Madness, Affliction, and Recovery That Reveal the Surprising History of the Human Brain
Regency Buck
Wizards at War
The Book of Embraces
The Year of Yes
Ten Little Indians
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.
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