Top 129 Quotes & Sayings by Jennifer Weiner - Page 2

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Jennifer Weiner.
Last updated on December 22, 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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
If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place? — © Jennifer Weiner
If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?
I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.
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.
Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Found, I told myself. Try to get found. — © Jennifer Weiner
Found, I told myself. Try to get found.
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.
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.
The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.
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!
She hated the implied familiarity when customers requested things from her by name.
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.
...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.
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.
This is motherhood for you,' said my own mother. 'Going through life with your heart outside your body.
Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
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.
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.
If you put a pink cover on something, critics make a certain set of assumptions and may not even read the book. But my readers are happy with it.
I have these "pinch me" moments when I realize I got to be the thing I wanted to be growing up. I'm right where I belong.
We dated in our early 20s, when we were working at the same newspaper. We broke up, got back together and broke up again. I wanted to get married and have kids, but he wasn't ready. So I married someone else, had my daughters and the marriage ended ... and there was Bill. He'd never gotten married and was finally, finally ready. We discovered that we were still each other's favorite people to talk to.
I have the best divorce of anyone I've heard of.
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?
I think I'm much more comfortable talking about other books than my own!
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
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.
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
I'd love to spend a day being supermodel beautiful.
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.
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
The idea you can tell a writer of a specific religion to stop writing about that religion is presumptuous.
I struggle with the fact that men's popular fiction is talked about differently. Books like mine don't get as many reviews and probably won't win any prizes, but they entertain the pants off of hundreds of thousands of women.
I'm going to continue writing. I'll always be a storyteller. But I'm also taking time to enjoy my life.
There are a lot of women like me in the world, and we rarely get to see ourselves.
Stephen King writes mass fiction but gets reviewed by the New York Times and writes for the New Yorker. Critics say to me, "Shut up and enjoy your money," and I think, OK, I'll shut up and enjoy my money, but why does Stephen King get to enjoy his money and get reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review?
If you get the you-are-a-genius label, it can limit you. Because I'm not so scrutinized, I have more freedom. And that let's me write what I want. — © Jennifer Weiner
If you get the you-are-a-genius label, it can limit you. Because I'm not so scrutinized, I have more freedom. And that let's me write what I want.
... 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.
I like blogs. they're good times.
Do I want to spend my diminished working hours writing or answering email? Now I have somebody read through them. If someone has something really important to tell me I write back. Otherwise they get the auto reply.
People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say,'
You move forward because thats the way it works; thats the only place you can go.
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.
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.
I think there are a lot of books about thin, attractive people having thin, attractive people's problems. I'm better set up to tell a different story.
I was 45 when I wrote most of this book [Hungry Heart ], at what felt like a halfway point in my life, and I thought, If I can't be honest now, when will it happen? It was so hard to step away from the [protection of] fiction, but I'm ready to talk start telling their truth.
Back in the day, when I was starting out, I'd get five or 10 emails and I'd respond to every one. But after my third or fourth book it got too time-consuming.
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