90 Quotes by Ariel Levy

We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol.

I think about all the time I spent vigilant, preoccupied, trying to decipher my mother’s relationship with Marcus, Lucy’s relationship with alcohol. It had never occurred to me that both situations were whatever they were, whether I figured them out or not. And it had certainly never crossed my mind that my reaction—my suffering—was mine: something I had come up with, not something I needed to blame on anyone else.

One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.

We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers, we want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, cosiness and thrills, but we can't have it all.

In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn’t working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.

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.

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