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The Female Persuasion QUOTES

The Female Persuasion QUOTES

1 " It was like some kind of full-mind, full-body fuck. That was what it was like when your entire self was engaged. That was what it was like to pay attention. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

2 " It could make you slightly psychotic if you really focused on the idea that girls had holes under their clothes. Holes that suggested, in the absence they pointed out, that they could be filled, and that you could do the filling. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

3 " After all, you could use your outside voice and scream your head off, but sometimes it didn’t seem as if the screaming was being heard. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

4 " I think that's what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don't feel we're allowed to be. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

5 " When women got into positions of power, they calibrated and recalibrated tenderness and strength, modulating and correcting. Power and love didn't often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

6 " He loved the way women, clothed, had a bosom, a single entity, but when unclothed, it cleaved into two discrete parts, two breasts, like the way you could separate an orange into halves by hooking thumbs into it. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

7 " Her letters were still bubbled and fat and juvenile, creating a disconnect between the content of what she was writing and the way she wrote it. Who would even take it seriously? "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

8 " You know, I sometimes think that the most effective people in the world are introverts who taught themselves how to be extroverts. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

9 " I think that’s what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

10 " Self-preservation is as important as generosity. Because if you don't preserve yourself, keep enough for yourself, then of course you have nothing to give. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

11 " At the podium Faith said, "Whenever I give a talk at colleges I meet young women who say, 'I'm not a feminist, but...' By which they mean, 'I don't call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure. I want to have a fair and good life. I don't want to be held back because I'm a woman. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

12 " And you don’t always have to feel the compulsion to keep striving toward something for the sake of striving. No one will think less of you. There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

13 " Your twenties were a time when you still felt young, but the groundwork was being laid in a serious way, crisscrossing beneath the surface. It was being laid even while you slept. What you did, where you lived, who you loved, all of it was like pieces of track being put down in the middle of the night by stealth workers. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

14 " For a long time he’d been periodically preoccupied by the idea that when someone you loved died, you could spend the rest of your life searching the world for that person and yet you would never, ever find him or her, no matter how many obscure places you went to, no matter how many caves you slipped into, or curtains you parted, or houses you entered. The dead person truly no longer existed, and while as a matter of science this fact seemed so simple, it was unaccountably hard to accept it when the person was someone you loved. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

15 " People did what they could, as powerfully as they could, until they couldn't do it anymore. There wasn't much time. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

16 " No, not just the visual. There's the emotional part too. There's that line Faulkner said, about how you don't love because. You love despite. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

17 " Faith Frank hired me, originally, based on nothing. She took me in and she taught me things, and more than that she gave me permission. I think that's what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don't feel we're allowed to be. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

18 " It was sort of like the way writers had long been pillaging all the good phrases from Shakespeare plays for the titles of their novels, so the only phrases still available meant nothing. Soon, Emmett thought, people would be writing novels called Enter, Guard. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

19 " People’s marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion

20 " There are some people who have such a strong effect on you, even if you’ve spent very little time with them, that they become embossed inside you, and any hint of them, any casual mention, creates a sudden stir in you. "

― Meg Wolitzer , The Female Persuasion