90 Quotes by Ariel Levy

It can be fun to feel exceptional – to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.

Writing was the solution to every problem – financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. 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.

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

There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda.

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.

Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then – abruptly, horrifyingly – it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.

Or maybe it was too late, and I had already chosen, inadvertently and incrementally, to be something else.

Has my watch stopped?” she wrote. “No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else – anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.

There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.