Jennifer Weiner Quotes

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

“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

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

“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

“Instead of hoping that some day the boys' club will open its doors, we can form our own clubs, define 'worthy' our own way, and celebrate the books and voices that we decide deserve celebration.”

— Jennifer Weiner

“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?”

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

“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

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

“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

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

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

— Jennifer Weiner

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

“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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

Born on third base and think they hit a triple,

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

“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

“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

I knew that it was no fault of ours. We weren't to blame, I thought to myself. I could let it go; I could set the burden down, I could be free.
Except, of course, that knowing something in your head is different than feeling it in your heart.

— Jennifer Weiner

“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”

— Jennifer Weiner

Change the setting, change the mood ... She'd taught him to make himself go outside if he was in, or inside if he was out, to interrupt the plummet with something as simple as making a cup of tea or spending a few minutes working on crossword puzzles.

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

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

“Seventeen, tells her”

— Jennifer Weiner

It was as if real life had been canceled for the day.

— Jennifer Weiner

“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

“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

“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