Quotes from Jennifer Weiner

wrathful old guy with a long white beard who was big on testing

Sometimes I wish it has been you.

plenty of them, including her beloved sorors, were the kind of blinkered, privileged, entitled assholes who'd go sailing through life, assuming that their hard work, not their privilege, was what ensured them their good jobs, good schools, nice houses, and pricy vacations. Born on third base and think they hit a triple, his mom used to say

The idea that I could somehow end up with a giant chunk of cash at the end of this left me feeling shivery, hot and then cold, like I was coming down with the flu.

I thought, not for the first time, that maybe it would have been better if he'd just died, a thunderclap heart attack, an artery bursting in his brain, a peaceful exit in the middle of the night, in his own bed, after his favorite meal, with my mom beside him. We'd have mourned, then moved on. This was a slow-motion catastrophe, death by a thousand cuts.

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

space, nobody could hear you scream; on the Internet, nobody could tell if you were lying.

I knew that on Monday there was every chance she would ignore me. It wouldn't matter. I would still want to be her friend, because she was everything I wanted to be. She was beautiful, and funny, and glamorous; a long, unfurled ribbon of cool, where I was a sweaty pretzeled knot of striving

My aunt and uncle sold their place years ago. They made a kil—a fortune," he said, cutting himself off before he could say killing.

Increased attention meant more scrutiny and scorn.

lovely memory / Until eternity; / She came, she loved, and then she went away.

And she's got blue hair, and old-lady clothes. It's fine. She's one hundred percent herself. And she wouldn't be that strong, she wouldn't have the courage of her convictions, if she didn't have a mom like you.

or maybe even back to my parents' place, away from all these beautiful people who, just by living, made me feel inadequate, at once enormous and small.

if you use people your entire life, if you manipulate them and take from them, and throw them away when you don't need them anymore, then yes, there are consequences. Bad things happen.

Hell is an Eagles game, where the bleachers are always freezing, and the team is always losing, and my family is insane.

Diana could have spent the rest of her life content, with just those episodes, and those questions, to remind her of what she'd survived and what she'd done. She could have lived like Eve in the garden, ignoring the snake, avoiding the apple tree. And then, one day, the apple tree found her.

She was going to be an orphan soon, a woman without parents in the world. Which meant that she was the parent now; the one who had to set the example and do the right thing, even when it was the hard thing, and bear some of her burdens and hurts alone.

in a world where being born female meant spending years of your life at risk, and the rest of it invisible, existing as prey or barely existing at all.

instead of cash. It took me the better part of another week to register

She'd learned that his wife's real name was not Daisy. It was Diana, and, somehow, that unsettled her almost as badly as finding the picture had. It made her think that she was the rough-draft Diana, the one who got crumpled up and tossed in the trash, while his wife was the final version, the one who was beloved, cherished, marriage material.

It's too empty. Too lonely. No one to see, nothing to do. But he hadn't told her no. As the first weeks and months had passed, Christina had come to cherish the solitude and the silence, the slant of late-afternoon sun that warmed the floorboards where her ginger cat slept.

Moochie, I hope that wherever you are, you can catch every cat you chase, that you get to eat every chicken wing you find, and that nobody complains when you wake them up in the middle of the night and pretend you have to go out just so you can nudge them out of the warm spot in the bed.

When I looked up, I wasn't surprised to find that my feet had taken me back to where it had all began. In the daytime, the windows at Dive 75 were dark, the door shut tight. It didn't look special, but it was, in a way, the place where I'd been born. The site of my greatest shame and my greatest triumph.

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. The more followers I got, the more I thought about that contradiction; the more my followers praised me for being fearless and authentic, the less fearless and authentic I believed myself to be in real life.