Jennifer Weiner Quotes

Sometimes the point isn't to end up with something worth showing the world. Sometimes it's just rehearsal.

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

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

Writing let me escape ... It let me escape the insistent tug of my family, and its ongoing misery. Sitting in front of the computer, with the screen blank and the cursor blinking, was the best escape I knew. And there was plenty to escape from.

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?

You have to open yourself up to the universe's possibilities.

And remember-no woman ever said, on her deathbed, I wish I'd eaten less cake.

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.

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

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

The thing about bad decisions is that they don't feel like bad decisions when you're making them. They feel like the obvious choice, the of-course-that-makes-sense move. They feel, somehow, inevitable.

He's a great guy, she said ,and he heard her try to sound enthusiastic,like she was selling herself on her soon-to-be-husband's greatness ... and then,in a whispered rush, just before she cut the connection,he thought he heard her say,Sometimes I wish it had been you

A writer wasn't a body, just a byline. My words would be sharp and spiky, punchy and pointed; my stories would be swift and lean, sleek and enviable, moving fast and hitting hard. I would not, I vowed, write like a fat girl.

Holding a bottle of Evian water

People are like that. They can only give you what they have inside. So if this Sydelle character is giving you so much trouble, it's because she's nothing but trouble on the inside. She's just delivering what's in her heart into the universe.

I'm not in charge of my life.

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.

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.

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.

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 was a parallel universe that ran alongside the normal world, and if you went through the wrong door, or turned left instead of right, ran up the street instead of down it, you could accidentally push the curtain aside and end up in that other place, where everything was different and everything was wrong. That

If you want to hit someone or you want to throw something, I want you to run first. I want you to run until you can hardly lift your legs and your arms. Run until you're exhausted, and then, if you still want to hit someone or throw something, you just wait 'til you've caught your breath again and then go for it. Try it,

drawing of a boy with brown hair and

My chest. All I'd wanted was for someone to be happy for me - happy with me, straight-up happy, not happy with questions, or happy with reservations, or happy but confused, or not happy at all ... and there was no one in my life, including my husband, who fit the bill.

Savasana - corpse pose - is the hardest pose of all. You would think, 'What could be hard about lying on the floor?' But the truth is that we, as humans, are not wired to be still and do nothing.

How could I live a life where the person who'd built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who'd seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?

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.

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.

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

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

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 you

Money is a tremendous advantage in just about everything, but in terms of reproduction, if you're a poor woman and you are infertile, it's like too bad, so sad. And if you are a wealthy woman, you can kind of buy whatever you want.

I miss him all the time." I shook my head, disgusted at my own mopiness. "It's like being haunted or something. And I don't have the luxury of being haunted right now. I need to think about myself ...

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.

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

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.

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.

F.E.A.R. Stood for face everything and recover

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

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.

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.

I didn't trust people who forgot to eat.

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

First of all, it's life. You don't win.

Just a regular gal, Jo thought, and smiled, thinking, If you only knew.

I should have been moved. I wasn't. It was as if I'd been frozen, as if I was now a woman made of ice, and he'd come at me not with a torch or even a candle, but with a toothpick, and was plink plink plinking against the smooth impenetrability of my body. I couldn't feel a thing.

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.

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 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.

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

This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.

Do not postpone life until two pounds form now. Go on the trip. Wear the strapless dress. Go zip lining, or water-skiing, or swimming with the dolphins. None of us are guaranteed a future. Putting ff joy until you're the right size could mean you'll never experience it at all.

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

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.

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!

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

Long as people can still surprise you, it means you're not dead.

Her anecdotes had a polished quality, like she had read a book on what could possibly make a beautiful girl sound sympathetic and memorized the answers.

Took him to a rink. Andy had watched the other skaters,

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.'

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.

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

Something that's bigger than you, and something that's kind and forgiving, I'd heard one of the meeting leaders say. That's all your Higher Power has to be.

It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.

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

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

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

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.

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 ...

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

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.

The girl, Gary's girl ... would keep bowls of Hershey's Kisses on the coffee table, and she'd decorate the house for all the big holidays and most of the small ones. Probably she'd be class mother, and PTA president, and she'd deliver meals to the elderly once a month. In bed, she'd be exuberant, and would take it as an endorsement when Gary sweated all over her.

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.

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

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.

seventeen, tells her

I don't answer. I shut my eyes and hold my breath and hope whoever it is will think I'm not here and go home.

Your friends will still be your friends, if they're good friends.

How do you find happiness in a body like yours ... like mine? How do you find courage to follow anything anywhere if you don't feel like you fit in the world?

Have you ever considered that there might be something wrong with your brain?
Oh, I think there might be something wrong with everyone else's.

She and her friends would talk about their husbands like they were children, or pets - some strange species responsible for bad smells and strange noises and messes they'd have to clean up.

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.

She loved [her daughters]. More than that, she admired them. They would be better than she was: stronger and smarter, more capable and less afraid, and if the world displeased them, they would change it, cracking it open, reshaping it, instead of bending themselves to its demands.

Face and figure from my dad's mother, Grandma Sadie, who was tall,

When I married him, but, in the ten years since, it seemed like he'd decided that anything that went wrong in his life or anyone else's was the liberals' fault. Ellie considered

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

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

I like blogs. they're good times.

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.

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

There is no magic weight, no magic size, no magic number on the scale where, as soon as you hit it, confetti rains down and a band starts to play and hidden doors slide open and Daniel Craig walks through them to lift you in his arms (because, thin as you are, he totally can) and carry you into the life of uninterrupted bliss that you just know could be yours, if you only wore a size two dress.

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?'

I'm not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what.

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.

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.

Once, she'd cried, telling me that she thought she should have noticed, should have seen that I was in trouble, should have done something. I told her it was my problem and my job to solve it. "Just be my friend," I said. "That's what I need most.

Someone had come in and mopped the floor, and the disinfectant smell was

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.

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.