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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.'
Ayelet Waldman
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Ayelet Waldman
Age: 59
Born: 1964
Born: December 11
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Hint
Lives
Tiny
Hints
Makes
Despair
Malice
Stories
Watching
Hoping
Littles
Writers
Crowd
Little
Standing
Think
Spend
Catch
Thinking
Listening
Crowds
Sliver
Story
Apart
More quotes by Ayelet Waldman
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
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
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
My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence.
Ayelet Waldman
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
I am a very nonspiritual person.
Ayelet Waldman
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
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
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
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.
Ayelet Waldman
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
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
I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move.
Ayelet Waldman
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.
Ayelet Waldman
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
There is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels.
Ayelet Waldman
Whatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.
Ayelet Waldman
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
I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.
Ayelet Waldman
I wish I could view the belly that oozes over the top of my pants as a badge of maternal honor. I do try. I make sure that the women whose looks I admire all have sufficient fat reserves to survive a famine, and I make a lot of snide comments about the skeletal likes of Lara Flynn Boyle and Paris Hilton.
Ayelet Waldman