Jami Attenberg > Quotes

“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.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“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.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“...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.”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

“What's the point of having a book club if you don't get to eat brownies and drink wine?”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

“Other people you know seem to change quite easily. They have no problem at all with succeeding at their careers and buying apartments and moving to other cities and falling in love and getting married and hyphenating their names and adopting rescue cats and, finally, having children, and then documenting all of this meticulously on the internet. Really, it appears to be effortless on their part. Their lives are constructed like buildings, each precious but totally unsurprising block stacked before your eyes.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“...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.”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

“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?”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“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.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“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.”
― Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie

“People architect new lives all the time. I know this because I never see them again once they find these new lives. They have children or they move to new cities or even just to new neighborhoods or you hate their spouse or their spouse hates you or they start working the night shift or they start training for a marathon or they stop going to bars or they start going to therapy or they realize they don’t like you anymore or they die. It happens constantly. It’s just me. I haven’t built anything new. I’m the one getting left behind.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“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.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“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.”
― Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie

“Everyone agreed that Edie was a tough woman to love, though she was worth loving.”
― Jami Attenberg

“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.”
― Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie

“...but she never wanted to be in a relationship ever again. Because relationships were the worst. So many obligations. So many compromises. So many arguments. Someone always got destroyed in the end. Sometimes everyone got destroyed in the end.”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

“Perfection itself is boring; it's only everything leading up to it that's interesting.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“What do you do when you already know what your problem is? What if it's not really a problem? It's only a problem if I want a relationship. If I want to fit into a conventional mode of happiness. It's only a problem if I care. And I can't tell if I care.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I stop painting entirely. I get a job in advertising. I get older. I grow up, I suppose. I never look back except in those moments when I can’t stop fucking thinking about it.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“If someone loves you, go home to them.”
― Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie

“His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.”
― Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie

“I have a hard enough time being me, not pulling myself apart every single day. And if it wasn’t just my personality and my life choices, but then also my art too? I would die.” I”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“I think about when I used to dress that way, not in that dress, obviously, but in that flesh. I will never do it again. I have learned all kinds of lessons from dressing that way, great lessons, terrible lessons, boring lessons, all of them, the big one being no matter how much you own yourself and your body and your mind, there are men who will always try to seek power over your body, even if it is just with their eyes, although often it is with their words and sometimes with their hands.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“He was a fool to think he could have love twice in this life. Arrogance. He held her hand close his chest with both of his hands. No one was entitled to anything in this life, not the least of all love.”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

“I am on Team Drunk Lady, obviously.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“But I cry anyway because it was a path I could have taken and didn't. I cry for the lost idea, the lost concept. Sometimes I cry, too, for who I was as an artist and what my life could have been like if only I had kept going. I weep for my lost identities. I weep for my possibilities.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Everyone always thinks of ghosts as being invisible or like air but they take up so much space in a room, you’ve no idea.”
― Jami Attenberg, Saint Mazie

“These are the things we do sometimes, she thinks. We remind ourselves of why we're in love, so that we can stay that way. It's not a permanent state, remember that, she tells herself.”
― Jami Attenberg, Instant Love

“He asks me if I'd like to see the apartment and I say 'Anytime,' and he says, 'Sure, why don't you come up now, then?' I can't think of a reason not to. There's nothing waiting for me at home but my refrigerator, my laptop, and death.”
― Jami Attenberg, All Grown Up

“Worst parent on the planet. All he knew how to do was bark orders and walk away. He didn't understand that his daughter was smarter than that, that she wasn't a dog.”
― Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

“Not ever was there a time when that man’s penis stayed put where it was supposed to be, instead living its life as a free-flying dilettante, a party penis, as if it were some sort of rich-kid celebrity DJ hitting new hot spots, London, Paris, Ibiza, except instead of those cities it would be a paralegal’s vagina instead.”
― Jami Attenberg, All This Could Be Yours: A Searing Southern Family Drama About Confronting Bad Men and Toxic Legacy