Jennifer Weiner 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

... 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Maybe it stems from my newspaper-reporting days, but I took notes the whole time - getting the call, how I felt. As soon as I put pen to paper, it became a story [Hunger Heart], not something happening to me but something I was recording.

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.

There's a part of me with every book that thinks, What would it have meant for me tohave had this book when I was a kid? I decided to create a book for girls like me. The Littlest Bigfoot is about bullying and body image and girls who don't fit in. It's like training wheels for my adult books - like Sex and the City, but with 12-year-olds.

I'd love to spend a day being supermodel beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it has as much to do with honoring my own voice as it does with feeling a responsibility to my readers or my daughters.

I was lucky to receive help at the beginning of my career and now I want to help other writers as much as I can.

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!

There's nothing wrong with keeping your mouth shut if you don't have anything nice to say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I hope that's what I've taught my girls - to be fair, to recognize their own position and their own good fortune, to use their voices to make things better. Beyond that, I'd tell them just to be kind.

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.

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.