Jen Larsen > Quotes

“I am the sum of my parts. Everything I’ve ever done and everything I’ve ever achieved and everything I have ever been.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“When you lose your temper, she has always said, you lose credibility.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“Dieting is a messy solution full of what ifs and possibilities and so many pitfalls, a thousand of them, and all of them assignable to personal failures and human weakness.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“There really are people in the world who have ready a list of adjectives about a fat person—including lazy , stupid , messy , incompetent —that they are certain describes her before she ever opens her mouth.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“Though putting off the inevitable only makes the inevitable loom larger, more dangerous and terrible.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“Sometimes I worry that I have poetry in me, the kind that makes you sentimental and sappy and vulnerable.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“Know where your skills lie and maximize your talent.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“There are days when everything and everyone looks bright and flawless and washed clean by sunshine. The sun makes it easy to forget that it won’t always be there.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“We agree that we’re still waiting for the epiphany. That permanent transformation, where confidence isn’t just a bulletproof shell. Where you’ve transformed into someone who has cut loose everyone else’s opinion and can never be hurt again.”
― Jen Larsen, The Big Reveal

“I wanted someone to tell me I was okay. I looked for something outside of me to fix everything. I looked for happiness as if someone could hand it to me in a package. I gave up on a part of myself.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I thought being skinny meant that the worry and stress and anxiety my body had caused me would be over. I wanted to punch my clock, step through the exit door, and be free and clear and with no obligations, in the Land of Eternal Slimness where problems did not exist.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I know that the body is smart, and the body is adaptable, and the body will always try to find a way, but we are smarter. We are smarter than our bodies and science has figured out a method, a clumsy method full of hacking and stitching back up, to undo biology and remake it. A messy sewing project that’s designed to circumvent nature, bypass evolution, fix everything that went wrong with your guts somewhere along the way. Because that’s the overall message.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“My body felt like a lie—I was not the person that my body insisted I was. In my head, I wasn’t fat. In my head, I was lovely and bright and sprightly and confident and I could be a happy person. In my body I felt like I was trapped by gravity, earthbound, sure that anyone who saw me believed in all the clichés about fat people—that they thought I was slovenly, lonely, bad-smelling, alone.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I wanted to make it funny, and make it meaningless, and make it nothing.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I was tired of letting things happen to me instead of making things happen. I was tired of being sad because there was nothing I could do, being weighed down by junk food and a closet overstuffed with clothes that didn’t fit me.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“And more than that, it was an attempt to make my body beautiful. It was the white flag I waved at the world. If you are forced to look at me, at least now you have something beautiful to look at.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I am stronger than caffeine.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“Maybe I’m surprised that his photos seem to be good. You kind of hope someone you sort of don’t like will also be bad at things.”
― Jen Larsen, The Big Reveal

“And yet here I was, in a whole new life. Not fat. I had finally gotten what I wanted. Every day I tried to drown that idea.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“was going to get weight loss surgery, and then my life could start. No one even hinted at the possibility that maybe I had been living my life all along.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“Saturday detention because of my shoulders, as if girls’ bodies are against the rules and our skin is a sex crime, and cracking down on that is more important than our actual education.”
― Jen Larsen, The Big Reveal

“I wanted to tell him about the hope that had started to bubble up inside me and made me feel lighter than I had ever felt, in a long time, how hope felt so much better than feeling wretched all the time, and was so much easier than trying to like myself.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“and I tried not to look significant.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“I thought I finally understood it—why some thin people were so angry at fat people for being fat. They thought fat people were breaking the rules. They assumed fat people got to eat the cake. They assumed that fat people never turned down anything. They assumed that fat people slept in a bed of ham with a pillow of bacon and never said no to seconds or shared their dessert, and they thought that’s not fair, and they were probably as angry at fat people for being able to eat as fat people were angry at skinny people for being able to be thin.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“It’s like a million tiny cuts that never scar, because the cuts keep coming”
― Jen Larsen, The Big Reveal

“The constant, nagging exhaustion had dialed back, but craziness began to creep in—an anxiety that wrapped itself around my head and clung heavily like a wet towel. A feeling that I had done something wrong, was doing something wrong, was about to do the worst thing wrong ever, as I tried to figure out what I was actually supposed to be doing.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head

“It is a feeling of gratitude sometimes when someone cares that much about you. It is hard not to want to live up to those expectations.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“Let’s all go get famous!”
― Jen Larsen, The Big Reveal

“I’ll take the word fat, and I’ll keep it next to my heart, and I’ll own it. And I’ll take up the space in the world that I take up and not apologize for it.”
― Jen Larsen, Future Perfect

“Oh, shit. I would have to tell my mother. I could have gone for the rest of my life without ever telling her. I could have said, lean protein! and long walks! and felt shitty forever. I was used to carrying around that low-grade sense of having done something wrong.”
― Jen Larsen, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head