A Quote by Jenny Lawson

I had very low self-esteem. Books saved me. I found friends in stories like The Chronicles of Narnia and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. During lunch hour at school I'd avoid social interactions by sitting on the bathroom sink and reading. My mother worked in my school cafeteria. When my anxiety got really bad, I'd put a coat on, grab my book and a flashlight, and hide in the freezer with the mac and cheese.

Jenny Lawson

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Anxiety Avoid Bad Bathroom Book Books Brooklyn Cafeteria Cheese Chronicles Coat Esteem Found Freezer Friends Got Grab Grows Had Hide Hour Interactions Like Low Low Self-Esteem Lunch Mac Me Mother Narnia Put Reading Really Saved School School Cafeteria Self Self-Esteem Sink Sitting Social Social Interaction Stories Tree Very Worked

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Jenny Lawson
American - Journalist
Born: 1973

School was a big source of anxiety for me. I hated school. I have social anxiety, and it developed when I was a kid. I had trouble going to birthday parties. It was always there. I begged my mom to let me be home-schooled at one point for a semester because I was so miserable at school.

Lili Reinhart

Growing up, I had a lot of family members who worked in the Dallas Independent School District, and they shared stories firsthand with me about kids stepping into the cafeteria hungry before practice, or waiting for the school building to open the next morning just so they could get a meal.

Kyler Murray

I'd been influenced by reading books on art and colonies that existed in Paris and places like that and so when I came to Europe I came to France and I had very little money, and I had to live low and stayed in a bohemian section of Paris with a lot of other students, who were from medical school, science school and art school. We all lived in a kind of communal way and I was challenged politically, because I didn't have a clue and they would ask me questions about the Algerian War, which was very big in France in the late '50s.

Robert Redford

I don't like to give the sob story: growing up in a single-parent home, never knew my father, my mother never worked, and when friends came over I'd hide the welfare cheese. Yo, I failed ninth grade three times, but I don't think it was necessarily 'cause I'm stupid. I didn't go to school. I couldn't deal.

Eminem

When I was a teenager, I thought if any of my friends or people at school see me reading a book, they're gonna think I'm weak. So I didn't even do it in private. Then I grew up, got into college, and the teachers turned me on to books, and I got hooked.

George Pelecanos

My mother used to read me from Bank Street schools, that book, you know, Bank Street school had these early reader books. And my mother would read to my brother and I and we had all those advantages that everyone says you need to be successful in school and I was successful in school.

Maya Wiley

'The Chronicles of Narnia' are war-determined stories. I do not think Lewis could have written well or truthfully if he had tried to avoid the reality of war.

Stanley Hauerwas

Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up.

Shawn Ashmore

I had very, very bad self-esteem - that I was a fake, everybody was going to find out, that I didn't deserve to have success, just about my looks and really, really bad self-esteem.

Geena Davis

For me, I was in school and I pushed myself to be a good student, just because that's the type of person I was, but I never had a connection to any of it. I don't think my brain functioned in a way that was at its height, when I was in school. I needed something like art to really value the way my mind works. I wasn't reaching my full potential by sitting in a classroom and reading from a book. My mind didn't work that way.

Misty Copeland

Have you ever found your heart's desire and then lost it? I had seen myself, a portrait of myself as a reader. My childhood: days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew, forbidden books read secretively late at night. Teenage years reading -trying to read- books I'd heard were important, Naked Lunch, and The Fountainhead, Ulysses and Women in Love... It was as though I had dreamt the perfect lover, who vanished as I woke, leaving me pining and surly.

Audrey Niffenegger

I myself discovered many authors through school reading lists and through school anthologies. The positives are: young readers can find the world opening up to them through books they study. The negatives may include bad experiences kids have - if they don't like the book or the teacher, or the way the book is taught.

Margaret Atwood

I literally feel like books saved my life. I found these people. Me reading Camus and Kafka, all of the tortured teenager stuff of someone who's falling in love with books. These people, these writers had the questions. They may not have had the answers, but they're not afraid to look at the questions head on. It was just life-changing for me. Yeah, books, honestly, I can't even tell you. I feel saved by books; I feel like they let me be who I was and find the world I wanted to be in.

Nathan Englander

My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class... Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.

Henry Rollins

There's no such thing as a folk writer. There's no such thing as somebody who's never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. Right? And I don't mean you have to go to school for it. But if you're - if you pay attention, you can learn it by reading books. And so I feel like I learned a lot by reading books.

David Sedaris

I was a huge rereader, so I've read all the Chronicles of Narnia, at minimum, 13 times each. In reading that series, I realized that someone had written those books, and that was that person's job. And I thought, 'That is the job for me. That is the job I'm going to have when I grow up.'

Lisa Papademetriou

A Quote by Jenny Lawson

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