Meg Wolitzer

“All of the women in that time and place, Thea had learned, were stuffed into muslin and starched cotton and forced to sit ramrod-straight and plait their hair or pull it back off their faces with fish oil. There were shoes that laced up with a hundred eyelets, and corsets that required a special hook to open. Women were all in it together back then, as opposed to now, when one woman's experience could differ so greatly from another's that you never knew who you were talking to.”

“The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

“But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.”

“Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star...”

“New teachers were just a part of life, for a few days after one arrived, squawks of interest were emitted from various corners, but then they died away as the teacher was absorbed like everyone else...before you knew it, the fresh ones seemed to have been teaching there forever too, or else they didn't last very long, and were gone before you'd gotten to know them.”

“The students lurked on the edges of their teachers' lives for years, and brought bulletins from their own lives, which over time began to include lovers, ambitions, an upward trajectory.”

“Another spell had been thrust upon her so long ago...She hadn't been able to see it but it was real. Otherwise why would you rise up from your enclosed and well-defended self and go be with that other person? Why would you open your life, the most secret entries into yourself, to someone you didn't really know? Who would do that unless she had to?”

“People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It seemed that everywhere you went, people quickly adapted to the way they had to live, and called it Life.”

“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.”

“Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.”

“Maybe the idea of the supposed tension between working and nonworking mothers had been put out in the world just to cause divisiveness.”

“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.”

“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 often wanted to be alone. If you chose to be alone, you often felt the unbearable need for another body - not necessarily for sex, but just to rub your foot, to sit across the table, to drop his things around the room in a way that was maddening but still served as a reminder that he was there.”

“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.”