Top 35 Ariel Gore Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression.”

— Ariel Gore

2. “Your heart is the size of your fist; keep loving, keep fighting.”

— Ariel Gore

3. “In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn’t unhappiness or even depression, it’s anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.”

— Ariel Gore

4. “The last introvert in a world of extroverts. Silence: my response to both emptiness and saturation. But silence frightens people. I had to learn how to talk. Out of politeness.”

— Ariel Gore

5. “When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we’re doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.”

— Ariel Gore

6. “One thing that blocks flow is self-consciousness.”

— Ariel Gore

7. “You always thought older people were wiser. It’s not that. It’s just that our relatives are dead and we’re able to speak freely.”

— Ariel Gore

8. “I think there are different kinds of happiness. We know when we’re happy a lot of the time, but then there are those moments that have more of an afterglow, when the happiness has more depth.”

— Ariel Gore

9. “If you need help or advice, ask for it, but don’t worry too much about hurting other people’s feelings by not doing what they say. If your gut says no, trust it. Do what seems right.”

— Ariel Gore

10. “Everything is freedom and everything is loneliness. Make your choice and let the rest fall away.”

— Ariel Gore

11. “I’ve never been socially outgoing, but I suspect I’ve gotten more and more ambivalent about making new friends. I’m irritated by how-do-you-do chit-chat, but that’s how new relationships usually begin.”

— Ariel Gore

12. “A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.”

— Ariel Gore

13. “I don’t know if my mother was a narcissist – or bi-polar or borderline. Those were words she tossed around over the years.”

— Ariel Gore

14. “A lot of women make choices based on how they saw their mother’s choices working out, how they saw the choices of the women elders in their lives working out. There’s some rebellion in that, but there’s also some deep reflection.”

— Ariel Gore

15. “I always do like seeing other people dance in their cars. It’s one of the things that makes me happy.”

— Ariel Gore

16. “Some caregivers want to reciprocate the care they themselves received as children.”

— Ariel Gore

17. “When I was a kid, my mother’s parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.”

— Ariel Gore

18. “Looking for the perfect day is not going to make us happy, because that day isn’t going to come.”

— Ariel Gore

19. “Researchers warn us against walking out on married life without a dang good reason.”

— Ariel Gore

20. “They say change gets more difficult as we get older – each year we’re more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new.”

— Ariel Gore

21. “If you don’t like the fairy tales you’ve been handed, Ariel, you don’t have to conform to them. You can reauthor them. You can write your story however you choose.”

— Ariel Gore

22. “With each beat, the heart pumps nearly three ounces of blood into the arteries – seventy-five to ninety gallons an hour when the body is at rest.”

— Ariel Gore

23. “I didn’t know if the cure for my life was to lie to everyone about everything or to become brutally honest.”

— Ariel Gore

24. “Nourish the world with your words, yo.”

— Ariel Gore

25. “Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world.”

— Ariel Gore

26. “Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn’t actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.”

— Ariel Gore

27. “I’m sure there were plenty of loving, attentive mothers in the ‘me generation,’ but none of them lived at my house.”

— Ariel Gore

28. “My own habit had always been to write about the things that ticked me off in a given day. If I kept a journal at all, I kept it to vent.”

— Ariel Gore

29. “Looking out over that poisoned water, it seemed like such a scam of anti-earth abuser culture to teach people that they cause their own cancer with negative thinking. Maybe this desert lake had been guilty of negative thinking?”

— Ariel Gore

30. “In our cultural history, all emotions have been more culturally acceptable to women.”

— Ariel Gore

31. “New Agers have always told us that we create our own realities. Mind over matter.”

— Ariel Gore

32. “Maybe what shame needs to stay alive is the consent of the shamed.”

— Ariel Gore

33. “Settling other people’s land is an American tradition.”

— Ariel Gore

34. “Shame can look a lot like rude.”

— Ariel Gore

35. “In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.”

— Ariel Gore

36. “I wondered at all the ways abuse invents us.”

— Ariel Gore

37. “Conventional wisdom tells us we’ll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.”

— Ariel Gore