Top 100 Jennifer Weiner Quotes
#2. You'll get through it, she said, leaving out the part I already knew-because you're a mother now. Because mothers don't have a choice.
Jennifer Weiner
#3. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#4. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#5. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#6. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#7. So I could write a story about a girl who was a lot like me, her ex-boyfriend, who was a lot like Satan, witha twitchy eyelid and a penis the size of a worn-down nub of an eraser.
Jennifer Weiner
#8. I wrote my first books when I was single and then I got married and then had a kid and there were different things happening in my life.
Jennifer Weiner
#9. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#10. I don't particularly like being angry about stuff. I'd rather hang out with my daughter and write my little books.
Jennifer Weiner
#11. Right now women are using surrogates because they can't be pregnant. What worries me is the possibility that soon they'll use surrogates because they don't want to be pregnant.
Jennifer Weiner
#12. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#13. Did any love ever feel as sweet as first love? Were we all just damaged goods now, battered cans in the grocery store sale bin, day old bread, marked down at the registered, hoping that someone would look past the obvious flaws and love us enough to take us home?
Jennifer Weiner
#14. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#15. I get really starstruck and tongue tied when I'm around other writers and the conversation tends not to go well.
Jennifer Weiner
#16. He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn't love me anymore, and it's not the end of the world.
Jennifer Weiner
#17. 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?'
Jennifer Weiner
#18. 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.'
Jennifer Weiner
#19. conversation with Dave, telling him what had happened.
Jennifer Weiner
#20. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#21. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#22. Love", I said, "is the rug they pull out from under you. Love is Lucy always lifting the football at the last second so that Charlie Brown falls on his ass. Love is something that every time you believe in it, it goes away. Love is for suckers, and I'm not going to be a sucker ever again.
Jennifer Weiner
#23. The ones who nod in sympathy when their friends talked about street harassment, but whose lived experience involved more shouts of "lose some weight" than cat calls and leers. The
Jennifer Weiner
#24. Every mother I've ever met, pretty much without exception, is doing the best job she can ever do.
Jennifer Weiner
#25. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#26. husband, Dave, my daughter, and I had moved out of Cen- ter City and into a house in Haverford that I refused to call a McMansion, even though that's exactly what it was, but I loved Ellie's pediatrician so much that 1'd never even tried to find a suburban replacement.
Jennifer Weiner
#27. Hefty? I'd railed to Peter, waving the clipping for emphasis. Hefty? For the record 'Hefty' is a trash bag. I'm festively plump.
Jennifer Weiner
#28. The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.
Jennifer Weiner
#29. If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
Jennifer Weiner
#32. You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.
Jennifer Weiner
#33. I also believe that if you're really a writer, you'll write, and that nobody could stop you.
Jennifer Weiner
#34. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#35. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#36. This is motherhood for you,' said my own mother. 'Going through life with your heart outside your body.
Jennifer Weiner
#37. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#38. I don't write literary fiction - I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.
Jennifer Weiner
#42. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#43. Face and figure from my dad's mother, Grandma Sadie, who was tall,
Jennifer Weiner
#44. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#45. With motherhood and marriage there was no finish line, no hour or day or year when you got to say you were through. Life just went on and on, endless and formless, with no performance evaluation, no raises or feedback or two weeks' vacation.
Jennifer Weiner
#46. Admitting you had a problem was the first step - everyone knew that - but admitting you had a problem also left you open to the possibility that maybe you couldn't fix it
Jennifer Weiner
#47. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#48. If there had been an exercise I'd liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?
Jennifer Weiner
#49. There's something really nice about writing something on Wednesday and watching it being performed live for a studio audience on Tuesday. You never really get that with novels.
Jennifer Weiner
#50. I've always been interested in the economics of reproduction, who gets what they want when it comes to childbearing and how these days, money is a tremendous advantage.
Jennifer Weiner
#51. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#52. 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
Jennifer Weiner
#53. He'd been lonely, and I'd been lonely, but if we were together, we'd never have to be lonely again.
Jennifer Weiner
#54. I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.
Jennifer Weiner
#55. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#56. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#57. I'm not cut out to be a famous person; I can't do my hair and makeup well enough.
Jennifer Weiner
#58. You move forward because thats the way it works; thats the only place you can go.
Jennifer Weiner
#60. 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?
Jennifer Weiner
#61. Mooo," she said ... "I mean mmmm," she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life.
Jennifer Weiner
#62. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#63. Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.
Jennifer Weiner
#64. 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!
Jennifer Weiner
#65. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#66. You have to open yourself up to the universe's possibilities.
Jennifer Weiner
#67. It's just you and the track and the clock. It's the most elemental thing there is-the simplest and the hardest. No everybody is cut out for it.
Jennifer Weiner
#68. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#69. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#71. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#72. If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the 'Times' might notice you.
Jennifer Weiner
#73. Long as people can still surprise you, it means you're not dead.
Jennifer Weiner
#74. I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.
Jennifer Weiner
#76. Whenever people with money have power over people with less money, you have the potential for exploitation.
Jennifer Weiner
#78. I was an English major in college, took a ton of creative writing courses, and was a newspaper reporter for 10 years.
Jennifer Weiner
#79. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#80. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#81. 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
Jennifer Weiner
#82. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#83. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#84. People are always coming up to me with my books and saying, 'You write these things I think but I could never say.'
Jennifer Weiner
#85. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#86. Husbands and houses are negotiable," she said, "And as for a plan ... we'll figure it out.
Jennifer Weiner
#87. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#88. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#89. I can carry a tune with a three-note range. Once I'm out of that range, I'm in trouble.
Jennifer Weiner
#90. He had sacrificed so much
And now? What if not even all that was enough to quiet that voice ... the voice that said, 'You're not worthy, you don't deserve it, nothing you do will ever be enough.
Jennifer Weiner
#91. Took him to a rink. Andy had watched the other skaters,
Jennifer Weiner
#92. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#94. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#95. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#96. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#97. 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
Jennifer Weiner
#98. Someone had come in and mopped the floor, and the disinfectant smell was
Jennifer Weiner
#99. 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.
Jennifer Weiner
#100. It was easy to make good choices when you had a web of people supporting you, not to mention money as a safety net when everyone else in your family did the right thing, went to the right college, held down a job.
Jennifer Weiner
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