Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ayelet Waldman
Age: 59
Born: 1964
Born: December 11
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Couple
Blog
Months
Columns
Living
Lungs
Like
Producing
Regular
Banshee
Keeping
Banshees
Loud
Shrieking
Daily
Column

More quotes by Ayelet Waldman

Image
I tell myself that after four children my belly is already so stretched and flabby that I have to do origami to get my pants buttoned. One more pregnancy and I'd be doomed to elastic waists for the rest of my life.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Courage is impulsive it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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?
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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).
Ayelet Waldman
Image
My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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
Image
I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, 'A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.'
Ayelet Waldman
Image
Gym class was, of course, where the strongest, best-looking kids were made captains and chose us spazzes last. More important, it was where the figures of supposed authority allowed them to do so. Forget the work our parents did molding our minds and values. Everything fell apart as soon as we put on those maroon polyester gym suits.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
For a couple of months there I was shrieking like a banshee.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I've only ever been interested in drugs as therapeutic tools.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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