
Sleepwalking

You cannot replace children who have died. You can fill in for them for a while, but then you have to step back, gracefully.
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
You cannot hold people together if they do not belong together. It may work for a while, but then things begin to fall apart—there is silence and restlessness, and you know it is time for someone to leave.
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
It seemed to Claire that there was no place you could ever go to isolate yourself from the world—there were always peripheral noises, distractions calling you back.
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
Profound things happened when you weren’t looking, and there were times when you couldn’t look, when you had to close your eyes for a moment of private darkness.
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
You couldn’t raise a child to love life. You just had to cross your fingers and hope that it would happen naturally. Life is good, you subtly had to drum into your child’s ears, bolstering the message by displays of love and affection. You had to hold your child, and you had to be unafraid of holding your spouse in front of your child.
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
It was too easy. Letting go also meant other things, things people never discussed. There were restrictions; everything always had to be cathartic these days.
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
I’d been pushing ahead of everybody for years, like Plath, and I saw that none of it would mean anything in the long run, that I would die like everyone else.”
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.
Meg Wolitzer • Sleepwalking
The idea of simile especially pleased her; the fact that something could be compared to something else in a way that was far-fetched and yet true made her feel that there just had to be a certain connectedness among all the things in the world.