Quotes from Jennifer Weiner

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.

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

She'd seen it happen to her friends, fellow PhD students, some who'd published their work. Put a ring on their finger and, through some dark magic, they turned into wives and mothers, and instead of talking about Elizabethan poetry or symbolism in Shakespeare's sonnets or how the market economy had shaped post–Civil War America, it was all teething and toilet training and which towns had the most desirable school districts.

È un libro sull'amore capace di trascendere l'aspetto fisico, su come la bellezza sia un confine arbitrario e facile da superare, su come due persone possono entrare in sintonia nonostante le differenze fisiche, su come possono innamorarsi malgrado il loro aspetto esteriore li separi dal resto del mondo.

She hates me, Jo would think, but even that didn't hurt so much, because her father loved her, and she could carry his love, like a glowing coal in the center of her chest, feeling its warmth even in the face of her mother's fury.

Try and fail and try again.

You try, and fail, and try again, and fail again.

She couldn't imagine not being a mother. She was happy and fulfilled. Or, at least, she was happy enough, fulfilled enough.

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.

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. "Hey!

The girl, Gary's girl....would keep bowls of Hershey's Kisses on the coffee table, and she'd decorate the house for all the big holidays and most of the small ones. Probably she'd be class mother, and PTA president, and she'd deliver meals to the elderly once a month. In bed, she'd be exuberant, and would take it as an endorsement when Gary sweated all over her.

Jo inhaled slowly, trying to think of all the time she'd had with her granddaughters, and not everything that she'd miss.

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.

Have you ever considered that there might be something wrong with your brain? Oh, I think there might be something wrong with everyone else's.

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.

arrived in the afternoon, along with

grabbing for the last loaf of bread or gallon of milk or four-pack of toilet paper, as if everyone's snow-day plans included French toast and diarrhea.

A body was just a body, just a vessel for her soul, and

The air smelled like the inside of the cabins at the summer camp in Maine: must from the off-season, wet wood and mold, bug spray and sunscreen, sunshine and sweaty kids. The essence of summertime.

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?

We lose ourselves," she repeated, forming each word with care, "but we find our way back." Wasn't that the story of her life?

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.

Anger surged inside her, and Bethie tried to push it aside. I could have this, if I wanted it, she told herself. She could starve herself thin again, cut her hair, find a guy, buy a little house in a neighborhood full of identical little houses. She could have everything Barbara had, everything her sister had, only she didn't want it, not any of it.

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.