The Female Persuasion Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“People’s marriages were like two-person religious cults, impossible to understand.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“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

“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

“I think there are two kinds of feminists. The famous ones, and everyone else. Everyone else, all the people who just quietly go and do what they’re supposed to do, and don’t get a lot of credit for it, and don’t have someone out there every day telling them they’re doing an awesome job.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“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

“All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the disinterested parents.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“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

“Sisterhood,” she said, “is about being together with other women in a cause that allows all women to make the individual choices they want. Because as long as women are separate from one another, organized around competition—like in a children’s game where only one person gets to be the princess—then it will be the rare woman who is not in the end narrowed and limited by our society’s idea of what a woman should be.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“A man who degraded and threatened women made you want to do everything possible. Howl and scream; march; give a speech; call Congress around the clock; fall in love with someone decent; show a young woman that all is not lost, despite the evidence; change the way it feels to be a woman walking down a street at night anywhere in the world, or a girl coming out of a KwikStop in Macopee, Massachusetts, in daylight, holding an ice cream. She wouldn’t have to worry about her breasts, whether they would ever grow, or grow big enough. She wouldn’t have to think anything physical or sexual about herself at all unless she wanted to. She could dress the way she liked. She could feel capable and safe and free, which was what Faith Frank had always wanted for women.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“interrupted by a couple of familiar shrieks that you might hear in a restaurant when there’s a large group of women at a table. Everyone here knew that shriek, which signaled the happiness of women spending time together.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“Inteligente. For years it had been enough to be the intelligent one. All that had meant, in the beginning, was that you could answer the kinds of questions that your teachers asked. The whole world appeared to be fact-based, and that had been a relief to Greer, who could dredge up facts with great ease, a magician pulling coins from behind any available ear. Facts appeared before her, and the she simply articulated them, and in this way she became known as the smartest one in her glass.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“She knew what it was like to miss someone, for she missed Cory so continually and pressingly that the feeling was like its own shattering bass vibrating through her, and he was only 110 miles away at Princeton, not across the world.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“Love is when you feel, like, oh, oh, my heart hurts...Or like when you see a dog and you feel like you have to touch its head.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“Greer had noticed, when she was very young, how, looking straight ahead, you could sort of always see the side of your own nose. Once she realized this it began to trouble her. Nothing was wrong with her nose, but she knew it would always be part of her view of the world. Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She'd always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. All written words danced in a chain for her, creating corresponding images as clear as the boy from Iran's bouncing family. She had learned to read before kindergarten, when she'd first suspected that her parents weren't all that interested in her. Then she'd kept going, plowing through children's books with their predictable anthropomorphism, heading eventually into the strange and beautiful formality of the nineteenth century, and pushing backward and forward into histories of bloody wars, into discussions of God and godlessness. What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“What she responded to most powerfully, sometimes even physically, were novels. Once Greer read Anna Karenina for such a long, unbroken bout that her eyes grew strained and bloodshot, and she had to lie in bed with a washcloth over them as if she herself were a literary heroine from the past. Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood. Regardless of how bad it got at Ryland, she knew that at least she would be able to read there, because this was college, and reading was what you did.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“She missed his young, vulnerable, ownable self. You never knew when you were lifting your child for the last time; it might seem like just a regular time, when it was taking place, but later, looking back, it would turn out to have been the last.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“But sometimes the way to get involved is to just live your life and be yourself with all your values intact.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“The thing that really gets me,” she said, “is that the worst kind of man, the kind that you would never allow yourself to be alone with, because you would know he was a danger to you, was left alone with all of us.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion

“To commit to actual things composed of wood and metal and fabric was to make real the vagueness and unreality of love.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Female Persuasion