Quotes from Ariel Levy

But I understood, now, her dilemma. I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.

She told me, Everybody doesn't get everything. It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.

GRIEF IS A WORLD you walk through skinned, unshelled.

I had traveled across Asia for six months with a backpack when I was twenty-two. My mood on those exotic days in Katmandu and Da Nang alternated between euphoria and lonely terror. I had traveler's checks that I kept with my passport in a little sack that I wore under my T-shirt at all times, afraid that someone would snatch it and then I would be completely fucked.

Writing was the solution to every problem.

But in a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. 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.

I asked if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.

Look at Grandma," my mother would say. "You never want to be dependent on a man." The fear of ending up like Tanya, cutting coupons in a one-room efficiency surrounded by strangers, made me vigilant like my parents, anxious that the poverty of our ancestors was always just one wrong move away.

We liked being wild, but not nearly as much as we liked being acceptable.)

One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt the shtetl nipping at my heels.

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment. From my mother, I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care. I also learned that you can launch a powerful campaign of resistance by mincing garlic like a martyr.

It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late.

Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.

Greece was falling apart. The streets of Athens were crawling with cats and dogs that people had abandoned because they could no longer afford pet food. But our hosts were jubilant. Their family didn't seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea bloomed in my head that being ruled by something other than my own wishes and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a release.

We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers, we want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, cosiness and thrills, but we can't have it all.

A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he's really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice.

Life, so plodding and seemingly circumscribed, was labile, fragile.

Though Margaret has a South African accent and my mother retains a vaguely midwestern inflection, flecks of Yiddish float through both of their speech. They are the same size and shape (small, with fluffy silver heads of hair) and they both wear loose shirts and comfortable sandals.

You have to understand, a man is a man; it's doesn't matter what position he's in

At Emma's wedding, while we are eating the white cake together after my toast, she says, "Do you hate me for being pregnant?" And I tell her the truth. I feel that her child, in a lesser but still crucial way, will be mine, too. —

When I hear that someone has lung cancer, did he smoke? comes into my head midway between the syllables can and cer. Obviously I don't say it out loud, but I want to know, because I want to believe that if only my loved ones and I refrain from smoking, we will be ineligible for lung cancer (and, ideally, every other kind of cancer).

I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl.

It was very dark in there. The air smelled stagnant and sweaty and the drinks were so strong they fumed. But the women were magnificent, like enormous birds: feathery false eyelashes fluttering, tight, shiny dresses in peacock blue and canary yellow, the dim light reflecting off their sequins. Mayita and I stood out. We were puny, dressed in jeans and drab sweaters, little pigeons.