Quotes from Jami Attenberg

I find that short stories are almost like palate cleansers or brain cleansers.

It's the differences in people that help you realize who you are. Even if we silently pass each other on the street.

It's good to pass on stories.

I'm a really selfish person. But I would do anything for my friends.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

I always tell people this when they're looking for an agent - they should love your work. You are entitled to work with someone who believes in you. Why do business with someone who is ambivalent about you and your art?

I can act like a boy as much as I want, but when I wake up in the morning, I'm still a woman.

I check my phone first thing when I wake up in the morning. I usually take it up with me to bed so it's on the floor next to the bed, although not actually in bed with me, because I really do not want to be the person who sleeps with their phone.

What I try very hard to do is have an hour or so in the morning when I leave the house and don't have my phone with me. I'll go sit in a cafe and read and handwrite in my notebook and not be facing a screen. My head will be clear. I will be able to hear myself think. Because honestly for the rest of the day it's just screens, screens, screens.

Do you often find yourself uttering the phrase, 'I feel like I should go?' You do not need to go. You are busy that night. You are busy every night, forever.

In the wintertime I like macaroni and cheese.

With apologies to all my past boyfriends, I never loved a man the way I loved my old apartment.

What if I start making art again? What if I just did that? That is the thing I love, that is the thing I miss the most. For so long I have believed I could never catch up, but now I realize there's nothing to catch up to, there's only what I choose to make. There's still time, I think. I have so much time left.

Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions, too much salt and spice, too much anxiety, always a little dribbling down the front of my shirt. But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It's delicious.

and wasn't life full of layers and nuances, colored all kinds of shades of gray, and the way you felt about something when you were twenty or thirty or forty was not how you would feel about something when you were fifty or sixty or seventy---if only he could explain to her that regret can come at any time in your life, when you least expect it, and then you are stuck with it forever.

What's the point of having a book club if you don't get to eat brownies and drink wine?

if she had known just a few months before, during more innocent times, that she would feel that way for the rest of her life....which is to say conflicted, she would have treasured those unaware, nonjudgmental, preadolescent moments more thoroughly. (Oh, to be eleven again!) Because once you know, once you really know how the world works, you can't unknow it.

And worst of all, what if you don't know what you like at all? What if nothing sticks? Then you spend half your life wondering what it is you're supposed to be doing next. What happens after that?

I don't need to jump off cliffs into oceans to die, because every day there is a little death waiting for me. All I have to do is wake up and walk out the front door.

We all lose sometimes. Life's plenty easy when you're winning. It's what you do when you're down. That's the real test.

But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don't want to get married: they don't believe you. They think you're lying to yourself or to them or you're trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse for just telling the truth.

There ain't nothing wrong with being alone, which is what I am, or what I have been. It's when it turns to loneliness, when you get to feeling blue about it all, that you're in trouble. There's the problem, loneliness.

Everyone agreed that Edie was a tough woman to love, though she was worth loving.

I let the sun hit me. The sun's some kind of gift. Another day we're all alive. I wish she could understand. I'm just happy to be alive.