Jo Piazza > Quotes

“When you wake up next to someone every day, pick their hair out of the drain, clean up their dirty dishes, socks, and underwear, listen to them bitch about their job and tell the same stories and jokes over and over again, it's nice to be reminded of what it's like when they're not around - and to realize things are better when they are.”
― Jo Piazza, How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage

“A woman cannot have real autonomy unless she has reproductive autonomy. My hope is that one day both Church and society will embrace this justice issue. —Donna Quinn”
― Jo Piazza, If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission

“Oh… and we’re out of toilet paper.”

Then why don’t you replace it? It’s under the sink, in the same place I always put it after I buy it.”
― Jo Piazza, Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win

“Nearly every romantic comedy ever made ends with the wedding and leaves out the most interesting part—the marriage.”
― Jo Piazza, How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage

“marriage, it had taken Charlotte more than a decade to figure out, wasn’t the sum of the moments like this, the ones that took your breath away and made you thank God for the person you married. It was the totality of the moments that weren’t wonderful, the crises you weathered together, and the people you became on the other side.”
― Jo Piazza, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win

“He hates what I hate and that’s a real turn-on for me.”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“and I love it, how the women helped one another, protected one another, found secret ways to cooperate.”
― Jo Piazza, The Sicilian Inheritance

“You’re going to suffer…but be very happy.’ That’s how I feel about having kids sometimes.”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“It is more a way of life, a spirit, a story we pass down, a way of reminding ourselves that the only way for a woman to survive in this world is to help other women.”
― Jo Piazza, The Sicilian Inheritance

“When you've stepped in the shit you've got no choice but to keep walking until you get home to clean yourself up.”
― Jo Piazza, The Sicilian Inheritance

“I look at my long-married friends and wonder if perhaps the quotidian nature of daily married life-- the repetition, routine, and perpetual proximity of another human-- makes it dangerously easy to become numb to whatever made you fall in love in the first place and to search for imperfections where you once only found delight.”
― Jo Piazza, How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage

“Now that she had no way to control the outcome of the situation, she was able to put it in perspective. Maybe the world didn’t need her to fix everything. She’d been smug about that, often self-righteous and heavy-handed. Plenty of people glimpsed ghosts of lives they could have lived. She had at least attempted this one. That was worth something. Wasn’t it?”
― Jo Piazza, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win

“Let us touch the dying, the poor, the lonely and the unwanted according to the graces we have received and let us not be ashamed or slow to do the humble work.” —Mother Teresa”
― Jo Piazza, If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission

“Few things in life are as fundamentally satisfying as good, quick sex followed by a meal of mostly salty cheese.”
― Jo Piazza, The Sicilian Inheritance

“In college we learned from an Austrian hallmate that there was a German word for someone you immediately want to slap when you start talking to them—Backpfeifengesicht.”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“The Western transition away from tribal culture has caused us a few great losses - one of them is the concept of true community. Without community we turn to the economy to replace what we’ve lost by hiring therapists, nannies, doulas, reiki healers and housekeepers. But it’s hard to hire a mentor, to find women and men who’ve been there before us and are willing to honestly counsel us about what marriage really has in store.”
― Jo Piazza, How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage

“Forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew.”
― Jo Piazza, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win

“I stumbled into the miraculous discovery of being loved without having to put so much effort into striving to feel worthy of it.

Maybe it's what we all want from the people we love: to be seen for exactly who we are”
― Jo Piazza, We Are Not Like Them

“Holy Shit,” the Hen influencer finally clucks about an hour into our captivity.”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“A marriage, it had taken Charlotte more than a decade to figure out, wasn’t the sum of the moments like this, the ones that took your breath away and made you thank God for the person you married. It was the totality of the moments that weren’t wonderful, the crises you weathered together, and the people you became on the other side.”
― Jo Piazza, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win

“a group of crows is called a murder. A group of ravens is called an unkindness. Both are fitting”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“With her everything was either insanely beautiful or a terrible disaster”
― Jo Piazza, The Sicilian Inheritance

“Miss your face.”
― Jo Piazza, The Sicilian Inheritance

“We’ll keep you in the book-writing business as long as you want. The prairie is filled with secrets.”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“What the piece didn't capture was the fact that she still did the majority of the housework and a good deal of the parenting every single minute she wasn't at work. Max was forgiven for dropping the girls late at school or forgetting to pack juice or emergency underwear because he was the adorable stay-at-home dad. Other mommies swooped in to help him, so sorry for the hapless man whose wife made him shoulder the burden of parenting three young girls. You have it so easy. You're a goddamned hero just for being a man who takes care of your own children.”
― Jo Piazza, Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win

“They change the world every single day...through their actions, and living the way they believe Jesus would want them to live.”
― Jo Piazza, If Nuns Ruled the World: Ten Sisters on a Mission

“A man can work from sun to sun”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“The room got eerily quiet because it was true, and when you bring up something that’s true, people need to stop and think about it for a minute.”
― Jo Piazza, Love Rehab: A Novel in Twelve Steps

“at the end of the day he knows where his bread is buttered right now.”
― Jo Piazza, Everyone Is Lying to You

“Instead I wanted to talk about what it means to be an ambitious woman and what it often costs us. I wanted to explore how the media treats women and how women treat one another. I wanted to show how difficult it still is for a woman to run for office even though we all know we need more of us in government.”
― Jo Piazza, Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win