"Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?”“Hmm,” said Jules. “Yes. The Holocaust."
- Meg Wolitzer
"Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress."
"It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into..."
"There were the signed, spiral-bound Spirit-in-the-Woods yearbooks from three summers in a row and the aerial photograph of everyone at camp the second summer. In it, Ethan's feet were planted on Jule'..."
"The mystery of desire was way beyond the conceptual abilities of Jules Jacobson. It was like ... robotics. Just another subject that she couldn’t understand at all."
"If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?"
"Once, a few years earlier, Jules had gone to see a play at Ash’s theater, and afterward, during the “talkback,” when the audience asked questions of the playwright and of Ash, who’d directed the produ..."
"...because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young."
"Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story."
"After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it."