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f3c366c
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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2b1397b
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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4025df9
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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91d3b44
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He loved me. He loved me, but he doesn't love me anymore, and it's not the end of the world.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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f572e20
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I think every person who is single should have a dog. I think the government should step in and intervene: If you're not married or coupled up, whether you've been dumped or divorced or widowed or whatever, they should require you to proceed immediately to the pound nearest you and select an animal companion.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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4b085b9
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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88c5e36
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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fbf21c7
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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a36e2aa
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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c31c407
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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8bef7c9
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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."
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Jennifer Weiner |
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5841ca2
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You should be concerned about the state of your soul, not the state of your bank account.
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inspirational
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Jennifer Weiner |
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4cc704f
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There's all kinds of love in the world, and not all of it looks like the stuff in greeting cards.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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8d58af5
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Regular women carry pictures of their babies, their husbands, their summer houses. Fat ladies carry pictures of themselves at their skinniest.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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6624b54
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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d44e1b4
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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39a4147
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So here I am. Twenty-eight years old, with thirty looming on the horizon. Drunk. Fat. Alone. Unloved. And, worst of all, a cliche, Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones put together, which was probably about how much I weighed...
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Jennifer Weiner |
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9813916
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The condom broke. I know how stupid that sounds. It's the reproductive version of the dog ate my homework.
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sex
safe-sex
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Jennifer Weiner |
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6f3af8f
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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1562098
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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6d9cf3e
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Found, I told myself. Try to get found.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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efe7e0a
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God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the patience not to strangle my mother-in-law, chop her into little pieces, and dump them down a sewer.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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4007e04
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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."
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Jennifer Weiner |
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f2eed4d
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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62b232d
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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?"
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Jennifer Weiner |
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b2297a6
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She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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955de06
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I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I'd have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they'd even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods
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Jennifer Weiner |
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268ffc4
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Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.
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fear
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Jennifer Weiner |
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2c868bc
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When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforcement. Put three groups of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter how often they pressed. And the third group got pellets just once in a while. The first group, the professor said, eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward and t..
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Jennifer Weiner |
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811c52e
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I want to live in a world where people are judged by who they are instead of what size they wear.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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5708fd5
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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 l..
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Jennifer Weiner |
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816971b
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They wouldn't have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you're on a battleground, you don't have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing's broken, nothing's wrong.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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c76b76f
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Addie, please." More tears dripped down her cheeks. "Don't be so hard." "Oh, please," I muttered...and that was as far as I got. 'You broke my heart' were the words that had risen to my mouth, but I couldn't say them. That was what you said to a boyfriend, a lover, not your best friend. She'd laugh. And I'd had enough of being laughed at. I'd worked hard to get to a place where it didn't happen anymore, where I didn't move through life like..
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Jennifer Weiner |
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dc77261
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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14a8f11
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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
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Jennifer Weiner |
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a51ea49
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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 happene..
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Jennifer Weiner |
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a795fbf
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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48b02de
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They tried to bury us. They didn't know we were seeds." --MEXICAN PROVERB"
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Jennifer Weiner |
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612ecef
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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7079beb
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mooo," she said... "I mean mmmm," she moaned. Louder this time. Goddamn Dr. Seuss is ruining my sex life."
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Jennifer Weiner |
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b427e8d
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This is so much harder than I ever thought it would be...because the thing is, even if you're just working part-time, your boss is going to expect a full week's worth of work, no matter how understanding she is. That's just the nature of the working world-things have to get done, babies or not. And if you're like me-if you're like any woman who ever did well in school and did well at her job-you don't want to disappoint a boss. And you want..
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Jennifer Weiner |
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f97b85f
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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d31af47
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Hefty? I'd railed to Peter, waving the clipping for emphasis. Hefty? For the record 'Hefty' is a trash bag. I'm festively plump.
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Jennifer Weiner |
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75c552e
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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.
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Jennifer Weiner |