Quotes from Jennifer Weiner

Staying married, she'd decided, was a choice; one that had less to do with love and more with forbearance.

This is a door. You can close it and stay here, outside, by yourself, or you can walk through it and join them

Make sure you have people who love you, the real you, not the Instagram you. If you can't be brave, pretend to be brave, and if you can't do that yet, know that you aren't alone. Everyone you see is struggling. Nobody has it all figured out.

And I could see her for what she was... Someone who wasn't invincible.. Someone who had flaws, and things she wanted.

The trick of the Internet, I had learned, was not being unapologetically yourself or completely unfiltered; it was mastering the trick of appearing that way. It was spiking your posts with just the right amount of real… which meant, of course, that you were never being real at all.

And I could see her, after the Sunday we'd spent together, with a plastic bag full of olives and almonds and baba ghanoush swinging from her arm, young and pretty and heading into her brilliant future, smiling and saying, This was the best day of my life.

Chef had made paella, studded with linguica and chunks of lobster meat and fresh clams

was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning.

was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.

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.

Toronto Sydney New Delhi

room and refused to return to the table, even

If she gave yo now, without confronting Hal, it would all have been for nothing. He would continue to live in a world without consequences, a world where men like him hurt girls like her, then shook them off like they were dust underneath their shoes.....

I remember McPhee's notes, penciled in the margins: If humor is tragedy plus time, this needs more time. It wasn't the first occasion I was forced to think about the line between funny and mean, between punching down, not up, to figure out how to write about the things that made me angry in a way that was powerful, not didactic or unhinged.

She looked good in every shot, and not one of them had told the truth about the two of us, or about her, about who she was, or what she wanted, or who she'd been in love with. Not any more than my Instagram account told all of my truth, or Darshi's account, or Leela's.

smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess.

Look, just because a girl agrees to something once doesn't mean she's signed, like a permanent permission slip. That isn't how it works. We're allowed to change our minds

In the Jewish tradition, when someone dies, we say 'Baruch dayan ha'emet,' which means 'Blessed is the true judge.' " He looked at me, his eyes intent. "God knows your friend. God knows her heart. Who she was, and who she was trying to become.

I shut my eyes, assaulted by a sudden vision of Bruce and his new girl in his wide, warm bed, his arm wrapped companionably around her, telling my family secrets...and the new girl would give a wise, professionally compassionate kindergarten-teacher nod, all the while thinking what a freak I must be.

She'd gotten the butcher to grind a mixture of filet mignon and chuck steak for the burgers, and had blended in mushrooms and blue cheese; she'd ordered hot dogs from Chicago, which came delivered in a cooler of dry ice. She'd made her own barbecue sauce, plus dozens of elaborate canapés, slivers of smoked salmon on cucumbers and a refined version of onion dip, where she spent an hour caramelizing onions.

The new pills made my body feel loose and springy, warmed from the inside, but I didn't think there was a chemical yet invented that could have quelled my insecurity, or convinced me, in that moment, that my husband loved me still. A

I wondered if, at the end, she had known that she was dying, if she'd been in pain or if she'd been afraid, and I thought about how, in spite of all the ways we were different, Drue had spent a lot of her life being lonely… just like me.

Ruby stared down at the Doc Martens she'd started wearing after someone had dropped a prop marble bust on her left foot during a junior-year production of The Play That Goes Wrong and broken two of her toes.

remembered something my father had told me, about the comments I'd gotten after my bar-fight video had come out: When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you're angry, everything looks like a target. There are a lot of angry people in the world. And these days, they're all online.