Top 129 Quotes & Sayings by Ayelet Waldman - Page 2

I mean, I do actually think there is a qualitative difference between aborting in the early part of the first trimester and in, you know, the middle or later part of the second trimester, in a way that you feel about it in that you grow attached.

My kids are incredibly secure. More and more of their friends' parents are divorcing, but my kids have absolute confidence that we'll stay together forever. That goes a long, long way.

Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift.

When we choose to have an abortion, we must do so understanding the full ramifications of what we are doing. Anything less feels to me to be hypocritical, a selfish abnegation of reality and responsibility.

I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won't read hate mail.

I've sometimes thought that it's only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering.

The biggest challenge for any craft person or artist is to accept the constraints of their medium and make something beautiful despite them. That's kind of fun, actually.

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

So many women today have become so focused on their children, they've developed these romantic entanglements with their children's lives, and the husbands are secondary. They're left out. And the romantic focus is on the children.

My own husband was divorced when we met, but without kids. I don't know what I would have done if he'd had them. I got the message very early on that the worst mistake a woman can make is marrying a man with children.

I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.

I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

Look, if you ask a child, 'Would you rather have a fulfilled mother or a stay-at-home Sylvia Plath,' they'll pick Sylvia Plath every time. But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success.

I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.

I certainly don't think it's inevitable that we don't love children who don't carry our own DNA. If that were true we wouldn't have millions of successful adoptions to consider. I do think that it's harder to love a child when you come into that child's life after the unrequited passion of infancy and early childhood has passed.

Well, you know, I was raised by a 1970s feminist. My mom had a consciousness-raising group. I used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them.

Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.

Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'

The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

I’ve sometimes thought that it’s only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering.

I was terrified of LSD. I don't want to get arrested.

I've never really been interested in recreational drug use.

I was a federal public defender during the most important years of the drug war. I saw people go to jail for nothing, and go to jail for a long time.

When you consider America, there are hundreds of millions of people who have smoked marijuana illegally.

The thing I believe in most in the world is my own fallibility, so I am willing to believe that I may be wrong too.

Love & Marriage are about work & Compromise. They're about seeing someone for what he is, being disappointed and deciding to stick around anyway. They're about commitment and comfort, not some kind of sudden, hysterical recognition.

I really think we were charting a course to having a more sane response to mass incarceration, to drug use, and to understanding that the war on drugs has resulted only in the empowerment of vast criminal enterprises and the destruction of democracies around the world. And all that is coming to a miserable, horrific halt.

States began to realize how much money they were spending on incarceration and how much money they were spending fighting this ludicrous war on drugs that was actually counterproductive.

Perhaps my children will one day pledge their loyalty to the Republican Party. Or perhaps they'll dismiss my liberalism as mild pap, and become anarchists. Either way may well be a reaction to my manipulation, my values. We are all the product of the indoctrination we received at the hands of our parents, even when we are repudiating that ideology.

I smoked pot when I was a teenager because other kids were doing it, but I didn't enjoy it that much.

I really hate alcohol. I hate it because it's linked so closely to sexual assault in our culture.

Those of us whose parenting style can be described as "a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments," as Julie of A Little Pregnant puts it, rather than as a philosophy, are less invested in our own practices. What we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. What we need to remember is that there is no need to apologize for that, even in the face of the most red-faced outrage.

There is no fundamental truth and there's nothing to be connected to: I just believe that [LSD] makes you feel better.

I just don't have a lick of optimism left in me.

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

I've only ever been interested in drugs as therapeutic tools.

Here are my Mommy Messages: Wear a condom and test your Molly.

What I do with my kids is - and I think they probably do ignore us - is No Alcohol. If they're drunk they will be grounded for time immemorial.

I am a very nonspiritual person.

The idea of going down to Central or South American and taking ayahuasca and shitting my pants and puking in a circle of overprivileged white people is not my idea of a good time. That's not going to happen.

There is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels.

In a perfect world I think we would microdose with LSD instead of giving teenagers Adderall. But I'd like to see it studied first.

That connection between hormones and mood is so important to get a handle on, and it's also really important when you're considering taking medication.

I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.

With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist-and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist.

If God were like a Star Wars Force linking all consciousness, I supposed I could maybe believe that. But let's just say I'm not going to be running off to India to join an ashram anytime soon.

Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a tooth for a tooth?

In fact if I see you drinking I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks and call your mom.

Lots of medications work for a month, or a year, and then stop working.

It's incredibly important to me that my children don't put anything in their bodies that they haven't tested first - that's how you end up dying.

I believe the approach we take to talking to our kids about drugs can, in some cases, mean the difference between life and death. So my approach is really simple: I just don't want them to die. And I want them to be able to save someone's life if they see someone die.

The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline.

Nothing makes me roll my eyes faster than a "Coexist" bumper sticker.

The idea that [Jeff Sessions] is the man who is going to end the progress on the drug war makes me want to rip my hair out, every carefully nurtured curl on my head.

If your white privilege and class privilege protects you, then you have an obligation to use that privilege to take stands that work to end the injustice that grants that privilege in the first place.

Being a public defender makes you incredibly paranoid - and I would say with reason - about law enforcement.

If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence... eventually, things can go really, really wrong.

Whatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.

Why is it that loving something provides such little protection from betrayal?

I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale -- never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).