90 Quotes by Ariel Levy

Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.

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, through life.

My pristine grief was intermittently marred by dread. I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway.

There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It’s like having a new lover – even the parts you aren’t crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.

It was fun. Sort of. The reason it was only sort of fun was that my life had collapsed. Unlike the people at the party, with their homes full of spouses and children, I was as alone and unmoored as I’d been twenty years ago, in these same suburbs, hanging out with the same boys. In the intervening decades, I’d thought I was going somewhere. But I had just been driving around.

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.

When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth. –.

The whole point is that everybody gets to marry the person they love.

Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive.