Jennifer Weiner famous 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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Funny #Children #Teaching

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Love You #Thinking #Years

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

#Soul #Bank Accounts #States

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Thinking #Grieving #Sometimes

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

#Love #World #Ends

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Morning #Heart #Character

The difference between people who believe they have books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed persistence - the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day - the belief, even in the face of obstacles, that you've got something worth saying.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Book

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Writing #Wish #Way

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

#College #Hot #Fiction

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Love You #Long #People

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Strong #People #Body

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
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Baby #Jobs #School

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Baby #Hurt #Growing Up

I get really starstruck and tongue tied when I'm around other writers and the conversation tends not to go well.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Tongue #Conversation #Get Real

I also believe that if you're really a writer, you'll write, and that nobody could stop you.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Believe #Writing

You move forward because thats the way it works; thats the only place you can go.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Moving #Moving Forward #Way

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Hurt #Growing Up #Moving Forward

I can carry a tune with a three-note range. Once I'm out of that range, I'm in trouble.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Tunes #Three #Trouble

Every mother I've ever met, pretty much without exception, is doing the best job she can ever do.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Mother #Jobs #Mets

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Mother #Law #Serenity

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

#Dog #Stupid #Sound

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Love You #Kids #Years

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
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Crazy #Decision #Conscious

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

#People #World #Want

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Girl #Nursing #Men

I don't particularly like being angry about stuff. I'd rather hang out with my daughter and write my little books.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Daughter #Mother #Book

Things happen, and you can't make them unhappen. You don't get do-overs, you can't roll back the clock, and the only thing you can change, and the only thing it does any good to worry about, is how you let them affect you.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Worry #Doe #Clock

Whenever people with money have power over people with less money, you have the potential for exploitation.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#People #Exploitation

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Beach #Book #Writing

Women are far and away the bigger consumers of fiction than men, but men are still far and away the more reviewed, the more critically esteemed, the more respected. That can get frustrating.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Men #Fiction #Bigger

There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Nice #Writing #Tuesday

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Writing #Feelings #Chicks

It's like if a young woman writes it, then it's chick lit. We don't care if she's slaying vampires or working as a nanny or living in Philadelphia. It's chick lit, so who cares? You know what we call what men write? Books.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Book #Writing #Men

I sometimes read about authors who say they require a perfectly silent room maintained at precisely 68 degrees, with trash bags taped over the windows and a white-noise machine in the corner to write, and I think, 'Who are these people, and do any of them have kids?
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Writing #Kids #Thinking

I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Children #Book #Writing

Character is character and voice is voice, which translates nicely from writing novels to writing TV. But the process is different. You have a writer's room, people pitch you jokes and you collaborate.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Writing #Character #Voice

People say I'm not good at writing about men. My dad left when I was 16. Give me a break. I'm doing the best I can.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Dad #Writing #Men

My book sales make 'real writers' possible.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Real #Book

I'm not in charge of my life.
-- Jennifer Weiner

I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Book #Kids #Different

I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Giving #Safe #Wonder

I went to Princeton, I minored in women's studies.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Study #Princeton

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Jobs #Novelists #Males

If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Book #Writing #Names

Right now women are using surrogates because they can't be pregnant. What worries me is the possibility that soon they'll use surrogates because they don't want to be pregnant.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Worry #Use #Want

If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Writing #Men #Fiction

Many writers secretly long to be performers. You always get the 'if you weren't a writer' question. I would be a back-up singer, to stand in the back and go like 'do, do, do.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Long #Would Be #Singers

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Baby #Wall #Guy

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Grateful #Thinking #People

...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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Thinking #Orange #Secret

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

#Writing #Stories #Novel

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Book #Reading #Character

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

#Bags #Records #Trash

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Father #Men #Forever

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Beautiful #Matter #Said

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...
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Years #Eight #Drunk

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

#Mother #Heart #Body

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Glasses #Fleas #Flea Markets

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Dog #Thinking #Animal

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Suits #Skirts #Needs

I like blogs. they're good times.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Good Times

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Grateful #Thinking #Care

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Rocks #Pushing #Machines

Found, I told myself. Try to get found.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Trying #Found

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Mother #Forever #Way

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Book #White #Miracle

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Two #House #Parent

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
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Jobs #Eggs #Excellence

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Baby #Jobs #Husband

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Love You #People #Sorrow

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

#Cards #Looks #World

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Moving #Heart #Good Friend

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

#Fear #Inertia

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

#Names #Hated #Familiarity

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Love You #Thinking #People

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Grief #Years #Stones

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Book #Sleep #Night

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#War #Book #Luxury

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

#Summer #Baby #Husband

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Dream #Fall #Sleep

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?
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Broken #Sound #Doe

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

#Exercise #Firsts #Bigs

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#People #Choices #World

Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Jobs #Fiction #Kind

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!
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Bed #Couches #Futons

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
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Mother #Kids #Tone

I'm not cut out to be a famous person; I can't do my hair and makeup well enough.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Cutting #Makeup #Hair

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.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Hurt #Pockets #Stones

I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Writing #College #Years

People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say,'
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Book #Writing #Thinking

... somehow I couldn't stop. I had turned into someone that I would have pitied in another life; someone who searched for signs, who analyzed patterns, who went over every word in a conversation looking for hidden meanings, secret signals, the subtext that said, Yes, I still love you, of course I still love you.
-- Jennifer Weiner

#Broken Heart #Love You #Secret