Ariel Levy

“I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”

“People didn't like me; I was loud and aggressive. People can take it from a 42-year-old, but when you're a little kid, and people are like, 'You're loud and awful,' you think, 'I guess I am awful,' so writing and figuring out how to put things into words was the way I felt better.”

“I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who'd go to the Gobi desert pregnant.”

“You think you're being brave, you think you're being sexy, you think you're transcending feminism. But that's bullshit. - Susan Brownmiller”

“I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort that my parents built for me in the back yard. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at ease - I was self-reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.”

“Everyone's marriage is different. But everyone's marriage is a compromise.”

“It's a profound thing to watch another human being come out of your body.”

“I don't hear women who are less privileged thinking they're entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That's a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon.”

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

“This thinking that you can have every single thing you want in life is not the thinking of a feminist. It's the thinking of a toddler.”

“I think all the time about the ways in which I'm the beneficiary of the women's movement's success.”

“The 10 or 20 minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic; there is no adventure I would have traded them for.”

“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”

“Once I started getting paid to be a writer and not having lots of other gross responsibilities, like making the puzzle or whatever, then my ambition changed, and I thought, 'Now I want to be a good writer.' And that became my ambition.”