Top 60 Ayelet Waldman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

2. “Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.”

— Ayelet Waldman

3. “I have made so many mistakes as a mother. But the one thing that I know I do is I make sure my children know how much I love them and they are absolutely secure in that.”

— Ayelet Waldman

4. “If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.”

— Ayelet Waldman

5. “Because of my bipolar disorder, I tend to these mixed states, which are depressed but loud and agitated. So I can be terribly irritable. I go to cognitive behavioral therapy in order not to yell at my children.”

— Ayelet Waldman

6. “There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you’d be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.”

— Ayelet Waldman

7. “It’s hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you’re lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.”

— Ayelet Waldman

8. “Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I’m not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.”

— Ayelet Waldman

9. “The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog.”

— Ayelet Waldman

10. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

11. “I went from resenting my mother-in-law to accepting her, finally to appreciating her. What appeared to be her diffidence when I was first married, I now value as serenity.”

— Ayelet Waldman

12. “I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan – it was a graduation requirement.”

— Ayelet Waldman

13. “I used to refer to myself as a ‘theoretical anorexic,’ just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do – they’re smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too?”

— Ayelet Waldman

14. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

15. “One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.”

— Ayelet Waldman

16. “You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she’s still going to expect a passel of grandkids.”

— Ayelet Waldman

17. “By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.”

— Ayelet Waldman

18. “My new novel ‘Red Hook Road’ began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.”

— Ayelet Waldman

19. “Roaring like a tiger turns some children into pianists who debut at Carnegie Hall but only crushes others. Coddling gives some the excuse to fail and others the chance to succeed.”

— Ayelet Waldman

20. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

21. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

22. “Is Valentine’s Day a day to make cupcakes with your children? No, Valentine’s is supposed to be a day about romantic love.”

— Ayelet Waldman

23. “During the periods in my marriage when I chose to stay home with my kids rather than work as an attorney, it caused me no end of anxiety. Despite the fact that I knew I was contributing to our family by caring for our children, I still felt that my worth was less because I wasn’t earning.”

— Ayelet Waldman

24. “I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was ‘Never Again.’”

— Ayelet Waldman

25. “In a perfect world, probably we’d never yell, we’d just be firm and dispassionate. But of course, everyone yells at their children.”

— Ayelet Waldman

26. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

27. “One of the most important things the early LSD pioneers discovered is that the personality of the researcher administering the drug had a profound effect on the experience of the patient. If the examiner was cold and distant, the subject occasionally became hostile, even paranoid. The subjects of a warm and gentle researcher almost universally experienced feelings of love and joy.”

— Ayelet Waldman

28. “There’s nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase ‘I told you so.’”

— Ayelet Waldman

29. “I always tell my kids that as soon as you have a secret, something about you that you are ashamed to have others find out, you have given other people the power to hurt you by exposing you.”

— Ayelet Waldman

30. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

31. “Think about it, I say. How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I’m kidding. I’m not.”

— Ayelet Waldman

32. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

33. “I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.”

— Ayelet Waldman

34. “By presenting a faithful and honest record of my experience as a mother, I hope to show both my readers and my children how truth can redeem even what you fear might be the gravest of sins.”

— Ayelet Waldman

35. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

36. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

37. “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.”

— Ayelet Waldman

38. “If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee.”

— Ayelet Waldman

39. “I have two daughters and I have done everything in my power to prevent them from assimilating, even being aware of, my idiocy about my weight.”

— Ayelet Waldman

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

— Ayelet Waldman

41. “I pity the young woman who will attempt to insinuate herself between my mama’s boy and me. I sympathize with the monumental nature of her task. It will take a crowbar, two bulldozers and half a dozen Molotov cocktails to pry my Oedipus and me loose from one another.”

— Ayelet Waldman

42. “The capacity for extravagant emotion that my husband finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament.”

— Ayelet Waldman

43. “Let’s all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. Failing that, let’s go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another’s backs.”

— Ayelet Waldman

44. “I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.”

— Ayelet Waldman

45. “If only shame were a reliable engine for behavior modification. All it does is make me feel bad, which inspires me to bust open a bag of cheese popcorn, which then makes me feel crappy about my weight.”

— Ayelet Waldman

46. “I mean, I absolutely call myself a feminist. And by that, I mean a woman who believes that your opportunities should not be constrained by your gender, that women should be entitled to the same opportunities as men.”

— Ayelet Waldman

47. “You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they’re two really different art forms.”

— Ayelet Waldman

48. “In every union roles are assumed, some traditional, some not. My husband used to pay his own bills, I used to call my own repairman. But as marriages progress, you surrender areas of your own competence, often without even knowing it.”

— Ayelet Waldman

49. “How many people will die, have died, because of the wasted talents of intelligent and gifted women, forced into domestic drudgery, corseted by paternal demands, strangled by denial of opportunity?”

— Ayelet Waldman

50. “Although it’s long been known that 67 percent of women’s admissions to psychiatric facilities occur during the week immediately prior to menstruation, only recently have researchers begun to consider the effect of PMS on women with mood disorders.”

— Ayelet Waldman