Top 160 Jennifer Weiner Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “The organic produce guy, a young man who’d left Brooklyn in order to minimize his carbon footprint and consume only things he could make or grow himself. This had come to involve... going toilet-paper free the year before, and making his wife use discarded athletic socks for her monthly cycle.‘That poor girl!’ said Sylvie, privately resolving to figure out where the young woman was living and anonymously deliver some tampons, the really bad kind, with non biodegradable plastic applicators.”

— Jennifer Weiner

103. “Husbands and houses are negotiable,” she said, “And as for a plan... we’ll figure it out.”

— Jennifer Weiner

104. “Beauty was power, and Bethie wanted her power back.”

— Jennifer Weiner

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “She felt a great, impotent rage sweep through her, fury at the war, and the politicians who’d sent so many young men to be maimed or killed.”

— Jennifer Weiner

109. “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

110. “My parents aren’t cruel to them. They pay them well. It’s more that they treat them like they’re pets.”

— Jennifer Weiner

111. “First of all, it’s life. You don’t win.”

— Jennifer Weiner

112. “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

113. “If there had been an exercise I’d liked, would I have gotten this big in the first place?”

— Jennifer Weiner

114. “I also believe that if you’re really a writer, you’ll write, and that nobody could stop you.”

— Jennifer Weiner

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

118. “I can carry a tune with a three-note range. Once I’m out of that range, I’m in trouble.”

— Jennifer Weiner

119. “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

120. “Misses everything,” Lila said, and gave the faintest smile. “It’s like a joke. Like, there should be a Mister Everything somewhere.”

— Jennifer Weiner

121. “I’m not cut out to be a famous person; I can’t do my hair and makeup well enough.”

— Jennifer Weiner

122. “The measure of a man is, does he know how to love. Clement Sills knew how to love. That’s what he did. That’s what he taught every single one of us who were lucky enough to know him.”

— Jennifer Weiner

123. “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

124. “Just a regular gal, Jo thought, and smiled, thinking, If you only knew.”

— Jennifer Weiner

125. “Inadequacy and impostor syndrome are painful. They’re also great motivators.”

— Jennifer Weiner

126. “You make the wrong choices, you make mistakes, you disappear for a decade, you marry the wrong man. You get hurt. You lose sight of who you are, or of who you want to be, and then you remember, and if you’re lucky you have sisters or friends who remind you when you forget your best intentions. You come back to yourself, again and again. You try, and fail, and try again, and fail again. She.”

— Jennifer Weiner

127. “When your mom and I were your age, there weren’t a lot of options for girls. Like, you know how your mother’s always telling you that you can be anything you want to be when you grow up? That wasn’t what we heard. Men could be doctors or lawyers. We were just supposed to marry them.”

— Jennifer Weiner

128. “I knew what it was like to be the center of Drew Cavanagh’s universe. How her regard could make you feel like the brightest, shiniest, sharpest, most perfect version of yourself. And how she could turn an ordinary day into an adventure.”

— Jennifer Weiner

129. “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

130. “I wonder if novels work for women because they give us a safe place to talk about our ish.”

— Jennifer Weiner

131. “She couldn’t imagine not being a mother. She was happy and fulfilled. Or, at least, she was happy enough, fulfilled enough.”

— Jennifer Weiner

132. “Being a novelist is hard for anyone – male or female. You don’t get to quit your day job.”

— Jennifer Weiner

133. “Your friends will still be your friends, if they’re good friends.”

— Jennifer Weiner

134. “She just wants you to be able to be whoever you want to be, and love whoever you want to love.”

— Jennifer Weiner

135. “The measure of a man is, does he know how to love.”

— Jennifer Weiner

136. “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

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

— Jennifer Weiner

138. “On the best days, there’d be a new package of margarine, and Bethie would be allowed to break the capsule of yellow dye and squish it all around until all the margarine was yellow-colored.”

— Jennifer Weiner

139. “Make sure you have people who love you, the real you, not the Instagram you.”

— Jennifer Weiner

140. “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

141. “There are friends who tell you, “Someday you’ll laugh about this.” Susan’s my best friend because, with her, “someday” is always now.”

— Jennifer Weiner

142. “You fell into your life, the same way I fell into mine.”

— Jennifer Weiner

143. “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

144. “Everyone tries to put the best versions of themselves across. To fake it. And when they’re not doing that, they’re sitting behind their screens, passing judgment and feeling superior to whoever they think’s being sexist or racist that day.”

— Jennifer Weiner

145. “But if, in the end, she never lived the glittering, rich-lady life of her youthful imaginings, she’d have a life that made her happy.”

— Jennifer Weiner

146. “She hoped that things had changed, but she knew that they hadn’t changed enough. All the demonstrations, all the consciousness-raising, all the protests, all the pickets, all the books she’d read, all the conversations she’d had, all the ballots she’d cast, all the work and here they were, still.”

— Jennifer Weiner

147. “Bethie and Harold glowed, with success and contentedness, and with, Jo thought, a little meanly, the kind of well-rested good looks you could have only when you were childless.”

— Jennifer Weiner

148. “And here’s the good news: even if things don’t get better, you can always make them look good on the internet.”

— Jennifer Weiner

149. “You’re allowed to want to use your education. You’re allowed to want to be more than a mother.”

— Jennifer Weiner

150. “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