Jami Attenberg Quotes

I was fat because I lived in the Midwest in the 1970s, and everyone was a little fat then and only getting fatter.

Robin looked at Daniel and had the meanest thought of her life: "He'll do.

We all lose sometimes. Life's plenty easy when you're winning. It's what you do when you're down. That's the real test.

In your 40s, you shed those who bring you down and surround yourself with the most positive people you know.

He asks me if I'd like to see the apartment and I say 'Anytime,' and he says, 'Sure, why don't you come up now, then?' I can't think of a reason not to. There's nothing waiting for me at home but my refrigerator, my laptop, and death.

I don't know much about any of the Hasidim because the men won't talk to me because I'm a woman, and the women won't talk to me because, while I am Jewish, I'm not Hasidic.

What if I start making art again? What if I just did that? That is the thing I love, that is the thing I miss the most. For so long I have believed I could never catch up, but now I realize there's nothing to catch up to, there's only what I choose to make. There's still time, I think. I have so much time left.

He was a fool to think he could have love twice in this life. Arrogance. He held her hand close his chest with both of his hands. No one was entitled to anything in this life, not the least of all love.

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is a breezy, big-hearted treat, especially if you've ever wondered about the inner workings of America's national treasures
neighborhood bookstores.

No matter how much money I made from writing, I'd keep the bookstore job.

I don't need to jump off cliffs into oceans to die, because every day there is a little death waiting for me. All I have to do is wake up and walk out the front door.

My laptop broke and because of the storm I could not get a new one. And so I've been promoting my book via iPhone.

Smart, sharp, and hilarious, Slaughterhouse 90210 is the perfect pick-me-up and never-put-me-down book.

But I cry anyway because it was a path I could have taken and didn't. I cry for the lost idea, the lost concept. Sometimes I cry, too, for who I was as an artist and what my life could have been like if only I had kept going. I weep for my lost identities. I weep for my possibilities.

Middlestein thought texting was the same as Morse code, and the more people texted, the closer American came to being a nation at war.

I won't go anywhere near the new Times Square. It's seizure-inducing.

No matter how many feminist tracts you read, you never forget what boys like.

I have a hard enough time being me, not pulling myself apart every single day. And if it wasn't just my personality and my life choices, but then also my art too? I would die." I

I did get in a few fights in school. Kids threw around anti-Semitic slurs, not knowing necessarily what they meant. It was probably just something they picked up somewhere, as kids do.

My love can be easily bought with a steak from Peter Luger's.

I let the sun hit me. The sun's some kind of gift. Another day we're all alive. I wish she could understand. I'm just happy to be alive.

In its current incarnation in my life touring is a lot of airports and hotels and car services and only OK food.

In the wintertime I like macaroni and cheese.

I love doing readings. I could really give a crap about reviews. It's kind of about the readers.

Food and love are all intertwined at our core level. It can be a very nurturing, wonderful, loving thing.

She opened the McRib box and eyed the dark red, sticky sandwich. Suddenly she felt like an animal; she wanted to drag the sandwich somewhere, not anywhere in this McDonald's, not a booth, not Playland, but to a park, a shrouded corner of the woods underneath shimmering tree branches, green, dark, and serene, and then, when she was certain she was completely alone, she wanted to tear that sandwich apart with her teeth.

Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions, too much salt and spice, too much anxiety, always a little dribbling down the front of my shirt. But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It's delicious.

It's good to try stuff. I wrote a book that I threw away, and I think I just wrote it so I could try stuff in it and not be scared

People judge you because of your weight and your food issues. It's very visual.

There's something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.

My last book was speculative. I just don't quite know what I am doing. But I'll get there. I have a list of things I would love to write.

I always tell people this when they're looking for an agent - they should love your work. You are entitled to work with someone who believes in you. Why do business with someone who is ambivalent about you and your art?

And wasn't life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy
if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever.

Sometimes, things are just exercises.

I'm not really interested in writing or reading about people who are nice and easy. I like the problem children.

I remember being banned from other houses as a younger child during the winter holiday season; I was the only one who didn't believe in Santa Claus, and I was ruining everyone's Christmas.

I think about when I used to dress that way, not in that dress, obviously, but in that flesh. I will never do it again. I have learned all kinds of lessons from dressing that way, great lessons, terrible lessons, boring lessons, all of them, the big one being no matter how much you own yourself and your body and your mind, there are men who will always try to seek power over your body, even if it is just with their eyes, although often it is with their words and sometimes with their hands.

Many online journals get the most hits of the day during the lunch hour.

These people all woke up this morning and reminded themselves to be human beings. Not everyone knows how to do that. No vermin, my people. Real human beings.

Wouldn't that be nice if we could all afford to just freely pursue our dreams?

Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women.

Everyone always thinks of ghosts as being invisible or like air but they take up so much space in a room, you've no idea.

I actually didn't grow up in a household that loved Chinese food particularly, and it's not really my go-to food or anything ... We were more a pizza family, being from the Chicago area and all.

You can quit smoking, and never have to have a cigarette again to survive. But with food, it is a daily challenge.

I love reading books that you can't put down, and they just take you over for a night or a weekend.

And worst of all, what if you don't know what you like at all? What if nothing sticks? Then you spend half your life wondering what it is you're supposed to be doing next. What happens after that?

I am not one of those people who string their exes along. Instead, I run and hide: under the covers, behind my computer screen, on opposite coasts of the country.

It's not that I don't care," said Robin. "It's just that I don't want to know."

She knew too much already. This was real life, kicking her in the face, and she wanted nothing to do with it.

The interesting thing about overeating or being obese is there's this physical manifestation of it.

It's good to pass on stories.

I was fat because my parents were a little fat themselves at that point in their lives, and I ate what they ate.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

People architect new lives all the time. I know this because I never see them again once they find these new lives. They have children or they move to new cities or even just to new neighborhoods or you hate their spouse or their spouse hates you or they start working the night shift or they start training for a marathon or they stop going to bars or they start going to therapy or they realize they don't like you anymore or they die. It happens constantly. It's just me. I haven't built anything new. I'm the one getting left behind.

Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase?

Listen: I'm OK cute. I'm no stunner.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

I know the bestseller 'Gone Girl' doesn't need an ounce of support from me, but that book was as sharp and witty as they come.

His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.

Some journal writers choose to password-protect their site, which is either an incredibly responsible act or a paranoid one.

If she had known just a few months before, during more innocent times, that she would feel that way for the rest of her life ... which is to say conflicted, she would have treasured those unaware, nonjudgmental, preadolescent moments more thoroughly. (Oh, to be eleven again!) Because once you know, once you really know how the world works, you can't unknow it.

I can act like a boy as much as I want, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm still a woman.

I wish I could write while I'm on the road but it never works for me. I need to be sitting still.

Young adult novels don't shy away from the discussion of weight issues, and 'Blubber,' the tale of an overweight, not-so-sympathetic fifth-grader bullied by her peers, is a refreshing take.

What a character eats is a detail - like eye color or a favorite song. But food is also our lifeblood.

I'm a really selfish person. But I would do anything for my friends.

In 'The Odyssey,' every feast is extremely ritualized; high-status individuals even get a better cut of meat.

I've always been an old soul.

What do you do when you already know what your problem is? What if it's not really a problem? It's only a problem if I want a relationship. If I want to fit into a conventional mode of happiness. It's only a problem if I care. And I can't tell if I care.

My Twitter feed is probably my biggest resource of news. Other people scour the web so I do not have to, and I thank them for it.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

I have very distinct memories about growing up as part of what was then a very small Jewish community in Buffalo Grove, IL.

The fascinating thing about food is that if you have issues with it, you have to face it every single day.

My love life since I moved to New York from Chicago has been like a desert. I've had tiny little interactions of love, like finding shallow pools of water to drink from, and then I've moved on, hoping that I've stored enough love and affection and excitement to get me to the next place.

My parents are still married. They don't weigh 350 pounds; they go to the gym all the time.

He texts me on Wednesday and asks if I want to have dinner with him on Friday night. I say I have plans because I'm trying to play hard to get, which has absolutely never worked for me in my entire life. He

We've all got flesh. I've just got a little more.

I've got a better idea," says my mother. "Tell me about what you did today. Tell me about New York." So I do, I tell the lifelong New Yorker who chucked it for the woods about the streets of the city: how the subway was so crowded this morning I had to let four trains pass in a row and I was a half hour late to work; how I had a meeting in Times Square and I saw an army of painted topless women posing with tourists for money; how I saw two people dressed up as Disney characters get into a fistfight; how I ate a hot dog from a stand after my client meeting bombed and when I finished it I ate another, on one of the chairs scattered in Bryant Park. A string quartet was playing nearby, under a sponsor banner. "The music part was the part that saved me," I say. "All of it would have saved me," says my mother.

For years I'd thought my color was black: deep, dark, thoughtful, mysterious. Black, you can hide behind. But now I know it is red.

I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.

And she was funny and beautiful and she liked the same books, the same music, and she wanted everything I did, was in the exact same place I was in life, and just like that, add water and mix, instant love.

I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself.

Worst parent on the planet. All he knew how to do was bark orders and walk away. He didn't understand that his daughter was smarter than that, that she wasn't a dog.

I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.

But why should I care what he's doing if I'm crazy about you?'
'We are allowed to have more than one feeling at once,' said Kenneth. 'We are human beings, not ants.

I smoked for many years like a total idiot.

If someone loves you, go home to them.

To be an artist means a lifetime of being told no, with the occasional yes showing up just to give you enough hope to carry on.

I check my phone first thing when I wake up in the morning. I usually take it up with me to bed so it's on the floor next to the bed, although not actually in bed with me, because I really do not want to be the person who sleeps with their phone.

Do you often find yourself uttering the phrase, 'I feel like I should go?' You do not need to go. You are busy that night. You are busy every night, forever.

She is vaguely satisfied; in fact she is on the cusp of complete satisfaction, she teeters there, undecided. To give into complete satisfaction is to allow that it can disappear as quickly as it arrived. Once you feel it, you will want it forever. And you cannot have it forever. Because life is not perfect.

I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.

Everyone agreed that Edie was a tough woman to love, though she was worth loving.

I just think structure can make a book feel so much bigger. It's the architecture. You could use flimsy materials if you wanted to, even, but it could still feel big.

These are the things we do sometimes, she thinks. We remind ourselves of why we're in love, so that we can stay that way. It's not a permanent state, remember that, she tells herself.

But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don't want to get married: they don't believe you. They think you're lying to yourself or to them or you're trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse for just telling the truth.

Perfection itself is boring; it's only everything leading up to it that's interesting.

Does everything in this life begin and end with Judy Blume? Perhaps.

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

Sometimes blessings are indiscriminate.

I stop painting entirely. I get a job in advertising. I get older. I grow up, I suppose. I never look back except in those moments when I can't stop fucking thinking about it.