Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ayelet Waldman
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: December 11
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Personal
Wrists
Written
Essays
Often
Scale
Mean
Screen
Never
Screens
Scales
Honesty
Computer
Slashing

More quotes by Ayelet Waldman

Image
Whatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
Courage is impulsive it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
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
Image
I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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
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 love my husband more than I love my children.
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
If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence... eventually, things can go really, really wrong.
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
Image
My kids are incredibly secure. More and more of their friends' parents are divorcing, but my kids have absolute confidence that we'll stay together forever. That goes a long, long way.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
Look, if you ask a child, 'Would you rather have a fulfilled mother or a stay-at-home Sylvia Plath,' they'll pick Sylvia Plath every time. But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
That connection between hormones and mood is so important to get a handle on, and it's also really important when you're considering taking medication.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
If God were like a Star Wars Force linking all consciousness, I supposed I could maybe believe that. But let's just say I'm not going to be running off to India to join an ashram anytime soon.
Ayelet Waldman
Image
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
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