Jennifer Weiner Quotes

Divorce isn't such a tragedy. A tragedy's staying in an unhappy marriage, teaching your children the wrong things about love. Nobody ever died of divorce.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

I've learned a lot this year.. I learned that things don't always turn our the way you planned, or the way you think they should. And I've learned that there are things that go wrong that don't always get fixed or get put back together the way they were before. I've learned that some broken things stay broken, and I've learned that you can get through bad times and keep looking for better ones, as long as you have people who love you.

When I was five I learned to read. Books were a miracle to me - white pages, black ink, and new worlds and different friends in each one. To this day, I relish the feeling of cracking a binding for the first time, the anticipation of where I'll go and whom I'll meet inside.

He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn't love me anymore, and it's not the end of the world.

This is motherhood for you,' said my own mother. 'Going through life with your heart outside your body.

If you wish for something hard enough, the fairy tales teach us, you can get it in the end. But it's hardly ever the way you thought it would be, and the endings aren't always happy ones.

Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can't survive...it's the thing that makes you better than you used to be.

I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you're not married or coupled up, whether you've been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning.

I don't trust happiness. I turn it over as if it were a glass at a flea market or a rug at a souk, looking for chipped rims or loose threads.

I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do- because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicyle up a hill, to embrace the people I love and hold them fully, and to nurture a new life. I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not -will not- break.

Everyone has sorrow. Everyone has obligations. Everyone keeps going. You lean on the people who love you. You do the best you can, and you keep going.

You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.

When you get everything you wanted, I think maybe you do have to be a little grateful for the people who got you there... whether or not they thought they were doing you any favors at the time.

There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.

Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest.

Love", I said, "is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I'm not going to be a sucker ever again.

People will want you to behave a certain way, to make a certain choice because it reinforces the way they see the world...But you have to do what's right for you.

The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.

I decided.. that I could go on being scared forever, that I could keep walking, that I could carry my rage around, hot and heavy in my chest forever. But maybe there was another way. You have everything you need, my mother had told me. And maybe all I needed was the courage to admit that what I needed was someone to lean on.

The truth is, what I learned this year is that life is hard...Good people die for no reason. Little kids get sick. The people that are supposed to love you end up leaving.

As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did.

So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed...

It's as if the fasion designers decided that once a woman hit a certain weight, she'd have no need for business suits, for skirts and blazers, for anything except glorified sweatsuits, and they tried to apologize for dressing us like overaged Teletubbies by silk-screening daisies on the tops.

Found, I told myself. Try to get found.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” —MEXICAN PROVERB

Is it still there?" I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, "Does it sound broken?

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the patience not to strangle my mother-in-law, chop her into little pieces, and dump them down a sewer.

Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.

I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.

They say - "they" being the great philosophers, or possibly the cast of Seinfeld - that breaking up is like pushing over a Coke machine. You can't just do it, you have to set the thing in motion, rock it back and forth a few times.

I remember things like that...A lifetimes accredidation of unkindness, all of those little longering hurts that I carried around like stones sewn into my pockets.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

As the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and fall slid into winter, I realized one of the great truths about tragedy: You can dream of disappearing. You can wish for oblivion, for endless sleep or the escape of fiction, of walking into a river with your pockets full of stones, of letting the dark water close over your head. But if you've got kids, the web of the world holds you close and wraps you tight and keeps you from falling no matter how badly you think you want to fall.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Your first love is important. It’s part of your story. The story you’ll tell yourself, the one you’ll tell about yourself, for the rest of your life.

mooo," she said... "I mean mmmm," she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.

Head's all empty, I don't care,' he'd sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I'd force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I'd care.

She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.

Hefty? I'd railed to Peter, waving the clipping for emphasis. Hefty? For the record 'Hefty' is a trash bag. I'm festively plump.

I wanted love, the big love, the kind people wrote songs and made movies about. I wanted to be the center of some guy’s universe, the only thing he could think about. I wanted to matter that way.

I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I'd have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they'd even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods

Well, you can’t control what they do, but you can control how you respond to it…whether you allow it to drive you crazy, or occupy all of your thoughts, or whether you note what they’re doing, consider it, and make a conscious decision as to how much you’ll let it affect you

I didn’t feel anything but a bone-deep weariness. Like I was suddenly a hundred years old, and I knew at that moment I would have to live a hundred more years, carrying my grief around like a backpack full of stones.

But what we're really trapped by is perceptions. You think you need to lose weight for someone to love you. I think if I gain weight, no one will love me. What we really need is to just stop thinking of ourselves as bodies and start thinking of ourselves as people.

She wished she’d spent more time teaching her girls that women should forgive themselves, showing them how to take care of themselves with kindness. The world was hard enough, would beat them up enough without them adding to the pain.

I like blogs. they're good times.

The measure of a man is, does he know how to love.

The way I see it,” she began, “your mother’s devoted her whole life to you kids.” She said “you kids” in precisely the same tone I would have used for “you infestation of cockroaches

I don't like futons. They can't commit. I'm a bed! I'm a couch! I'm a bed! I'm a couch!

One of its ears stuck straight up, the other flopped as it ran, and I remembered something I'd read somewhere--that when God sees a dog he likes, He folds one of its ears down to remember it.

The trick of the internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real... which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all.

They wouldn’t have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you’re on a battleground, you don’t have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing’s broken, nothing’s wrong.

Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward because that's the way it works; that's the only place u can go. You keep going until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn.

You don't get perfect-but I was going to grab this happiness and hold it as tightly as I could. I was going to enjoy it for as long as it lasted.

There were things you could be hungry for besides food.

Hell is an Eagles game where the bleachers are always freezing, the team is always loosing, and my family is insane

There are two kinds of houses in the neighborhood where I grew up-the ones where the parents stayed married, and the ones where they didn’t.

If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?

We lose ourselves,” she repeated, forming each word with care, “but we find our way back.” Wasn’t that the story of her life? Wasn’t that the story of Bethie’s? You make the wrong choices, you make mistakes, you disappear for a decade, you marry the wrong man. You get hurt. You lose sight of who you are, or of who you want to be, and then you remember, and if you’re lucky you have sisters or friends who remind you when you forget your best intentions. You come back to yourself, again and again. You try, and fail, and try again, and fail again.

I was going to eat to nourish myself, I was going to exercise to feel strong and healthy, I was going to let go of the idea of ever being thin, once and for all, and live my life in the body that I had.

She hated the implied familiarity when customers requested things from her by name...

...thinking that the world was like an orange, that I could split it open with my thumbnail and find a whole different world, the grown-up world, the secrets beneath the skin.

So I could write a story about a girl who was a lot like me, her ex-boyfriend, who was a lot like Satan, witha twitchy eyelid and a penis the size of a worn-down nub of an eraser.

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.” —GRACE PALEY

You're allowed to want to use your education. You're allowed to want to be more than a mother.

In space, nobody could hear you scream; on the Internet, nobody could tell if you were lying.

Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.

I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren't looking; your husband could lose his job; our baby could get sick or die.

This is the meanest thing anyone’s ever done to me,” I said, through my tear-clogged throat. “I want you to know that.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I knew it wasn’t true. In the grand, historical scheme of things, my father leaving us was doubtlessly worse. Which is one of the many things that sucked about my father?? he forever robbed me of the possibility of telling another man, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and meaning it.

He’d been lonely, and I’d been lonely, but if we were together, we’d never have to be lonely again.

Misses everything,” Lila said, and gave the faintest smile. “It’s like a joke. Like, there should be a Mister Everything somewhere.

Baby," groaned the guy-Ted? Tad?-something like that-and crushed his lips against the side of her neck, shoving her face against the wall of the toilet stall.

Husbands and houses are negotiable," she said, "And as for a plan... we'll figure it out.

A girl named Jo once had a life / But that’s gone now; she’s only wife.

Addie, please." More tears dripped down her cheeks. "Don't be so hard." "Oh, please," I muttered...and that was as far as I got. 'You broke my heart' were the words that had risen to my mouth, but I couldn't say them. That was what you said to a boyfriend, a lover, not your best friend. She'd laugh. And I'd had enough of being laughed at. I'd worked hard to get to a place where it didn't happen anymore, where I didn't move through life like a walking target, where it was just me and my paints and brushes and my big empty bed every night. "You weren't a good friend," I said instead.

When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforcement. Put three groups of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter how often they pressed. And the third group got pellets just once in a while. The first group, the professor said, eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward and the rats who never get treats give up, too. But the random rats will press on that bar forever, hoping each time they press that this time the magic will happen, that this time they’ll get lucky. It was at that moment in class that I realized that I had become my father’s rat.

If she married a man, she could let him plan, let him push, let him maneuver; and the world they inhabited would welcome them. They would always have a place. It would be easy, and Jo was so tired.

This is so much harder than I ever thought it would be...because the thing is, even if you're just working part-time, your boss is going to expect a full week's worth of work, no matter how understanding she is. That's just the nature of the working world-things have to get done, babies or not. And if you're like me-if you're like any woman who ever did well in school and did well at her job-you don't want to disappoint a boss. And you want to do a good job raising your baby...It's not like you think it's going to be

Beauty was power, and Bethie wanted her power back.

You'll get through it," she said, leaving out the part I already knew-because you're a mother now. Because mothers don't have a choice.

And here’s the good news: even if things don’t get better, you can always make them look good on the internet.

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you’re angry, everything looks like a target. There are a lot of angry people in the world. And these days, they’re all online.

I’m not brave all the time. No one is. We’ve all been disappointed; we’ve all had our hearts broken, and we’re all just doing our best. Make sure you have people who love you, the real you, not the Instagram you. If you can’t be brave, pretend to be brave, and if you can’t do that yet, know that you aren’t alone. Everyone you see is struggling. Nobody has it all figured out.

Women had made progress - Jo only had to look as far as the television set to see it - but she wondered whether they would ever not try to have it all and do it all and do it all flawlessly. Would the day ever come when simply doing your best would be enough?

Picture each worry like a gift. Put them in order, from the mildest to the most intense. Imagine yourself picking up each one and wrapping it with care. Picture yourself placing the gift under a tree, and then walking away.

Admitting you had a problem was the first step - everyone knew that - but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn't fix it

Still waters run deep, I’d thought. Later, I learned that silence did not necessarily guarantee depth.

Would the day ever come when simply doing your best would be enough?

You’ve got to make time. It’s important. You know how they tell you on planes, in case of an emergency, the adults should put their oxygen masks on first? You’re not going to be any good to anyone if you’re not taking care of yourself.

When your mom and I were your age, there weren't a lot of options for girls. Like, you know how your mother's always telling you that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up? That wasn't what we heard. Men could be doctors or lawyers. We were just supposed to marry them.

Everyone tries to put the best versions of themselves across. To fake it. And when they’re not doing that, they’re sitting behind their screens, passing judgment and feeling superior to whoever they think’s being sexist or racist that day.

A body was just a body, just a vessel for her soul, and she was under no obligation to keep her body looking any certain way, no more than she was obliged to do anything just because it was customary, or traditional, or expected of women in America. She didn’t have to get married, she didn’t have to have kids, and she didn’t have to be thin.

I know that what had happened with my father - his insults, his criticism, the way he made me feel that I was defective and deformed - had hurt me. I'd encountered enough of those self-help articles in women's magazines to know that you don't go through that kind of cruelty unscathed. With every man I met, I'd watch myself carefully. Did I really like that editor, I'd wonder, or am I just searching for Daddy? Do I love this guy, I'd ask myself, or do I just think he'd never leave me, the way my father did?

Rose leaned against the bathroom door. Here it was — her real life, the truth of who she was, barreling down on her like a bus with bad brakes. Here was the truth — she wasn’t the kind of person Jim could fall in love with. She wasn’t what she’d made herself out to be — a cheerful, uncomplicated girl, a normal girl with a happy, orderly life, a girl who wore pretty shoes and had nothing more pressing on her mind that whether ER was a rerun this week. The truth was in the exercise tape she didn’t have time to unwrap, let alone exercise to; the truth was her hairy legs and ugly underwear. Most of all, the truth was her sister, her gorgeous, messed-up, fantastically unhappy and astoundingly irresponsible sister.

She took no pleasure from the very things I loved, from her size, her amplitude, her luscious, zaftig heft. As many times as I told her she was beautiful, I know that she never believed me. As many times as I said it didn’t matter, I knew that to her it did. I was just one voice, and the world’s voice was louder. I could feel her shame like a palpable thing, walking beside us on the street, crouched down between us in a movie theater, coiled up and waiting for someone to say what to her was the dirtiest word in the world: fat.

I had started on the marriage and motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal, read only by friends, blog called ‘Fifty Shades of Men’. I had written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our grown up time, and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers, I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat.” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is instead the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an email address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is the dominant Christian Grey and he’ll give her that computer plus an iPad, a beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear. Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom. Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.

I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.