Ariel Levy Quotes

For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.

It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.

We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising.

Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful turn to God.

You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.

What peace it must be to know that someone is yours, no matter what - it is ordained, can never be otherwise.

The truth is that the new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy with nothing to back it up.Or, as Susan Brownmiller put it...

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet i...

What teens have to work with, then, are two wildly divergent messages. They live in a candyland of sex…every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie...

Why is this the new feminism and not what it looks like: the old objectification?

Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.

That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected...

I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl.

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment.

Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work.

I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, Everybody doesn’t get everything.

But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the

I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, Everybody doesn’t get everything. It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essent...

My competent self is doing the talking; my bewildered self is being addressed.