Top 160 Jennifer Weiner Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “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.”

— Jennifer Weiner

52. “People don’t like to see things that aren’t perfect. It reminds them of what could go wrong in their own lives, I guess.”

— Jennifer Weiner

53. “Jo thought sometimes that Bethie liked to play at being a rebel, when the truth was that her sister had a genius for conformity, for making herself the best, most stylish example of whatever version of femininity was currently in fashion.”

— Jennifer Weiner

54. “My book sales make ‘real writers’ possible.”

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

57. “I don’t answer. I shut my eyes and hold my breath and hope whoever it is will think I’m not here and go home.”

— Jennifer Weiner

58. “She knew she’d be hearing that voice, those words, on an endless loop in her brain, maybe for the rest of her life.”

— Jennifer Weiner

59. “Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.”

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

61. “And remember-no woman ever said, on her deathbed, I wish I’d eaten less cake.”

— Jennifer Weiner

62. “You move forward because thats the way it works; thats the only place you can go.”

— Jennifer Weiner

63. “I went to Princeton, I minored in women’s studies.”

— Jennifer Weiner

64. “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

65. “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

66. “There were things you could be hungry for besides food.”

— Jennifer Weiner

67. “How could I live a life where the person who’d built and experienced and created it alongside me, the person who’d seen me in a hundred different moods, at my highest, at my lowest, in the middle of a C-section with my uterus laid out on my belly, was gone?”

— Jennifer Weiner

68. “Kau harus membiarkan dirimu beristirahat sekali waktu, bahkan meski kau ibu terbaik di dunia.”

— Jennifer Weiner

69. “You don’t think she ever loved your dad?” Shelley shook her head. “I think, for her, it was more like taking a job than falling in love. If you’ve been bred to marry a rich man and have his babies and basically be decoration, and you have no skills and no idea how to support yourself, how many options do you really have?”

— Jennifer Weiner

70. “Research shows that shaming fat folks into thinness doesn’t work. And come on if it did, most of the fat women in the world would have probably disappeared by now.”

— Jennifer Weiner

71. “Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.”

— Jennifer Weiner

72. “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

73. “Girls today, Judy Pressman had told her. They act like they’re the first ones to have done any of this. They’ve got to reinvent the wheel, and make everything ten times harder than it has to be.”

— Jennifer Weiner

74. “Please, God, or whoever’s up there, please just give me enough time to make it right.”

— Jennifer Weiner

75. “There would be menus, offered today by a girl.”

— Jennifer Weiner

76. “Women had made progress – Jo only had to look as far as the television set to see it – but she wondered whether they would ever not try to have it all and do it all and do it all flawlessly. Would the day ever come when simply doing your best would be enough?”

— Jennifer Weiner

77. “She hated the implied familiarity when customers requested things from her by name...”

— Jennifer Weiner

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

— Jennifer Weiner

79. “I was going to eat to nourish myself, I was going to exercise to feel strong and healthy, I was going to let go of the idea of ever being thin, once and for all, and live my life in the body that I had.”

— Jennifer Weiner

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “It was high school. Evil is kind of the name of the game.”

— Jennifer Weiner

84. “Found, I told myself. Try to get found.”

— Jennifer Weiner

85. “If she married a man, she could let him plan, let him push, let him maneuver; and the world they inhabited would welcome them. They would always have a place. It would be easy, and Jo was so tired.”

— Jennifer Weiner

86. “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

87. “But I’ll tell you a secret. You know what boys like? A woman who’s happy with herself. Who’s not making herself miserable with the Jane Fonda videotapes and complaining all the time about whether this part or that one’s too big. And you know what else they like? She leaned in close, whispering into her granddaughter’s ear. Good food.”

— Jennifer Weiner

88. “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

89. “One of its ears stuck straight up, the other flopped as it ran, and I remembered something I’d read somewhere – that when God sees a dog he likes, He folds one of its ears down to remember it.”

— Jennifer Weiner

90. “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

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

— Jennifer Weiner

92. “I’m not sure whether that had to do with the humor, or with the unfashionable fairy-tale ending, which is very different from much of what I read in The New Yorker, where short stories seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something’s happened but you’re not quite sure what.”

— Jennifer Weiner

93. “The problem was, he’d never told me what he wanted, which meant I never got to think about whether it was what I wanted, too.”

— Jennifer Weiner

94. “I listened, thinking this was a Drew I’d never seen. One who saw her own privilege. One who was trying to do better.”

— Jennifer Weiner

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “Women are far and away the bigger consumers of fiction than men, but men are still far and away the more reviewed, the more critically esteemed, the more respected. That can get frustrating.”

— Jennifer Weiner

100. “The first time around, she’d done the surgeries, the radiation, the chemotherapy. She’d lost her hair, lost her appetite and her energy, lost her left breast and six months of her life.”

— Jennifer Weiner