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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

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Ayelet Waldman
Age: 59
Born: 1964
Born: December 11
Journalist
Lawyer
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Place
Stands
Ends
Obligation
Firsts
Injustice
First
Privilege
Take
Protect
Work
Class
White
Protects
Use
Grants

More quotes by Ayelet Waldman

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The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog.
Ayelet Waldman
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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
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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
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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
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I just don't have a lick of optimism left in me.
Ayelet Waldman
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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
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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
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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
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I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.
Ayelet Waldman
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Courage is impulsive it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.
Ayelet Waldman
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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
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For a couple of months there I was shrieking like a banshee.
Ayelet Waldman