Quotes from Ariel Levy

my editor John Homans

It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it's true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It's more like, Oh, right.

chest—I could hear him denigrating Obama at the top of his lungs, which seemed to make Mary only slightly less uncomfortable than it made me. A few weeks before the trip, she said, when she was in the shower, seething about something he'd done, the words I chose him for you came up on the holy computer screen in her mind. What

Nature is wasteful, he had said. That's why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

What peace it must be to know that someone is yours, no matter what - it is ordained, can never be otherwise.

When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth.

I think about all the time I spent vigilant, preoccupied, trying to decipher my mother's relationship with Marcus, Lucy's relationship with alcohol. It had never occurred to me that both situations were whatever they were, whether I figured them out or not. And it had certainly never crossed my mind that my reaction—my suffering—was mine: something I had come up with, not something I needed to blame on anyone else.

Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism

Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God. My lined notebooks were the only place I could say as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted. To this day I feel comforted and relieved of loneliness, no matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen.

In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn't working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.

Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn't work. Logically, I knew that the person I'd lost was not fully formed, that he was the possibility of a person. But without him I was gutted. If my baby could not somehow be returned to me, nothing would ever be right again. This bitter winter would go on forever.

People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much.

I got married a few years later—we all did. As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony. There were several years of peace, but then the pregnancies started popping. I found this unsettling.

There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment.

People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much. I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.

I didn't want her girlfriend to suffer. But I didn't feel particularly guilty, either. They seemed so far from love, I even thought (stupidly) that the girlfriend might be happy to have Lucy taken off her hands. They had become strangers. Maybe they always had been. And we were magic.

It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.

Finally there was a place—for everything! Lucy's garage-sale golf clubs. The quilt with yellow stars from my stepmother. Books that we'd read, that we hadn't yet read, that we'd never read, all on shelves. The things that for years had remained in our parents' homes while we went about our young adulthoods inhabiting small spaces in big cities we brought to that house, and they comforted us. We were home.

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.

To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.

From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing 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!

The idea that sex can be reduced to fixed components as it is in pornography—blow job, doggie style, money shot, girl-on-girl—is adolescent: first base, second base, all the way. It is ironic that we think of this as adult entertainment. I don't see why we should regard porn as a way to enjoy "sexuality in all of its explicitness" any more than we consider looking at a chart of the food pyramid to be a feast.

We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol. It was almost a sport. We tore through sobriety together, drink by drink, until we occupied a separate reality from the rest of the world.

I could hear him denigrating Obama at the top of his lungs, which seemed to make Mary only slightly less uncomfortable than it made me. A few weeks before the trip, she said, when she was in the shower, seething about something he'd done, the words I chose him for you came up on the holy computer screen in her mind.