Quotes from Ariel Levy

If half this country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally, enjoying equal protection under the law), that they turn their attention—during wartime—to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren't going to render us sexually liberated.

Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.

Objectification is rooted in disrespect, condescending views of the opposite gender, and power struggles. When men realize that they have the capability to fundamentally respect women, and women realize that they have the power to present themselves as empowered, fully capable people, raunch culture may moan its last and final faked orgasm.

A tawdry, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a *kind* of sexual expression we now regard *as* sexuality.

Instead of trying to reform other people's - or her own - perception of feminist, the FCP likes to position herself as something outside the normal bounds of womanhood.

Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn't work.

My pristine grief was intermittently marred by dread. I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway.

The whole point is that everybody gets to marry the person they love.

Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.

Thank God for the cats, I thought, when they had the compassion to sleep next to me on the couch, or looked on curious but unfazed as I bawled. They were good companions to have in this strange new world of grief: nonverbal, affectionate, no more baffled by agony than they were by dishwashing.

The counselor says that we are at the beginning of a long, uphill journey. She says, Relapse is a part of recovery. I think, You have got to be fucking kidding me. I say, Do I look like someone who's ready for a long, uphill journey? Lucy snickers for a second, and I love her. I lover her much more than I want to. But I am worn down and out. The thought of another trip crushes me. I tell Lucy, You are my family. But I'm not coming with you.

There is something of value in trying to put the world into words.

It can be fun to feel exceptional--to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven't made any progress.

That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected, through life.

Sex that accomplishes this kind of transfiguration is a drug. It is not an easy thing to deny yourself once you know exactly where to get it.

Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God.

A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide.

For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body.

But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen. -Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue

Euripides wrote, "What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?" That was more like it. Am I allowed to say "my son"? Was it not a statement of fact that I had given birth on the bathroom floor of the Blue Sky Hotel in Mongolia and watched my son live and die?

Finding yourself single when you're used to being married can feel like slipping through the threads of the fabric of life. When there were two of you connected, you were big enough to stay suspended, but now you will fall through and plummet off the planet, alone. The risk is greatest when you are surrounded by intact couples and families. If you are among other single people and you feel yourself start to slip, there is always the possibility of grabbing on to another lone human.

Has my watch stopped?" she wrote. "No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don't look at them. Think of something else—anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.

Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn't play by those rules.

There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda.