"Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?"
- Meg Wolitzer
"...You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel—will they follow you over the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?”Goodman shifted in..."
"Soon, she and the rest of them would be ironic much of the time, unable to answer an innocent question without giving their words a snide little adjustment. Fairly soon after that, the snideness would..."
"Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent."
"Though Jonah felt transfixed inside his own childhood, no one else saw him as a child. He was already over the hump of middle age, heading rapidly toward those year that no one like to speak of. The b..."
"We had a good marriage," he said. "I just thought it would be so much longer." Then he shrugged, and coughed away a sob, this thin man in his sixties with the soft androgynous face that aging seemed t..."
"But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been ..."
"I always thought talent was everything, but maybe it was always money. Or even class. Or if not class exactly, connections."
"She understood that it had never just been about talent: it had also always been about money. Ethan was brilliant at what he did, and he might well have made it even if Ash’s father hadn’t encouraged ..."
"Jealousy was essentially "I want what you have," while envy was "I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can't have it."