Meg Wolitzer

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls__ven if you'd once been best friends__as now just that, outsiders.

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

Twitter," said Manny, waving his hand. "You know what that is? Termites with microphones.

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.

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__ father hadn__ encouraged him, but it really helped that Ethan had grown up in a sophisticated city, and that he had married into a wealthy family. Ash was talented, but not all that talented. This was the thing that no one said, not once. But of course it was fortunate that Ash didn__ have to worry about money while trying to think about art. Her wealthy childhood had given her a head start, and now Ethan had picked up where her childhood had left off.

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 there all along and would have come out even without this place.

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 to bring, as though all the hormones were finally mixed up in a big coed pot because it just didn't matter anymore.

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 best parts had already passed for people Jonah's age. By now you were meant to have become what you would finally be, and to gracefully and unobtrusively stay in that state for the rest of your life.

Dennis was present, still present, and this, she thought as she stayed landed against him, was no small talent.

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 soften, the irony would be mixed in with seriousness, and the years would shorten and fly.

...You want to know whether the problems that you teenagers feel__ill they follow you over the rest of your lives? Will your hearts always be aching? Is that what you are asking me?__oodman shifted in discomfort. __omething like that,_ he said.__es,_ said the counselor in a suddenly plangent voice. __lways they will be aching. I wish I could tell you something else, but I wouldn__ be telling the truth. My wise and gentle friends, this is the way it will be from now on.__o one could say anything. __e are so, so fucked,_ Jules finally said...

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

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.

Sometimes it's easier to tell ourselves a story.

...because when you're young, you don't really believe you'll ever be anything other than young.

Once, a few years earlier, Jules had gone to see a play at Ash__ theater, and afterward, during the __alkback,_ when the audience asked questions of the playwright and of Ash, who__ directed the production, a woman stood up and said, __his one is for Ms. Wolf. My daughter wants to be a director too. She__ applying to graduate school in directing, but I know very well that there are no jobs, and that she__ probably only going to have her dreams dashed. Shouldn__ I encourage her to do something else, to find some other field she can get into before too much time goes by?_ And Ash had said to that mother, __ell, if she__ thinking about going into directing, she has to really, really want it. That__ the first thing. Because if she doesn__, then there__ no point in putting herself through all of this, because it__ incredibly hard and dispiriting. But if she does really, really want it, and if she seems to have a talent for it, then I think you should tell her, __hat__ wonderful._ Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.

If someone said 'diametrically,' could 'opposed' be far behind?