Top 40 Ariel Levy Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

2. “Objectification is rooted in disrespect, condescending views of the opposite gender, and power struggles. When men realize that they have the capability to fundamentally respect women, and women realize that they have the power to present themselves as empowered, fully capable people, raunch culture may moan its last and final faked orgasm.”

— Ariel Levy

3. “I asked her if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.” It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.”

— Ariel Levy

4. “Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.”

— Ariel Levy

5. “Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism. –.”

— Ariel Levy

6. “John Updike wrote that marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.”

— Ariel Levy

7. “Thank God for the cats, I thought, when they had the compassion to sleep next to me on the couch, or looked on curious but unfazed as I bawled. They were good companions to have in this strange new world of grief: nonverbal, affectionate, no more baffled by agony than they were by dishwashing.”

— Ariel Levy

8. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

9. “Even if one life is manifest and the other is mostly hypothetical, the inability to occupy your own reality is torment, is torture. It is sin and punishment all in one.”

— Ariel Levy

10. “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. –.”

— Ariel Levy

11. “A real editor isn’t just someone you work with; he’s your guide.”

— Ariel Levy

12. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

13. “Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work.”

— Ariel Levy

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

— Ariel Levy

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

— Ariel Levy

16. “To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip.”

— Ariel Levy

17. “Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.”

— Ariel Levy

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

— Ariel Levy

19. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

20. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

21. “Finding yourself single when you’re used to being married can feel like slipping through the threads of the fabric of life. When there were two of you connected, you were big enough to stay suspended, but now you will fall through and plummet off the planet, alone. The risk is greatest when you are surrounded by intact couples and families. If you are among other single people and you feel yourself start to slip, there is always the possibility of grabbing on to another lone human.”

— Ariel Levy

22. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

23. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

24. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

25. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

26. “Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.”

— Ariel Levy

27. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

28. “For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body.”

— Ariel Levy

29. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

30. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

31. “And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.”

— Ariel Levy

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

— Ariel Levy

33. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

34. “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.”

— Ariel Levy

35. “There is something of value in trying to put the world into words.”

— Ariel Levy

36. “Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn’t play by those rules.”

— Ariel Levy

37. “For as long as I can remember, I have felt the shtetl nipping at my heels.”

— Ariel Levy

38. “All of my conjuring had led only to ruin and death. Now I was a wounded witch, waiting in the forest, undone.”

— Ariel Levy

39. “It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late.”

— Ariel Levy

40. “Writing was the solution to every problem.”

— Ariel Levy

41. “We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers, we want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, cosiness and thrills, but we can’t have it all.”

— Ariel Levy

42. “Look at Grandma,” my mother would say. “You never want to be dependent on a man.” The fear of ending up like Tanya, cutting coupons in a one-room efficiency surrounded by strangers, made me vigilant like my parents, anxious that the poverty of our ancestors was always just one wrong move away.”

— Ariel Levy

43. “One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else.”

— Ariel Levy

44. “There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment. From my mother, I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care. I also learned that you can launch a powerful campaign of resistance by mincing garlic like a martyr.”

— Ariel Levy

45. “GRIEF IS A WORLD you walk through skinned, unshelled.”

— Ariel Levy