Quotes from Ariel Levy

My competent self is doing the talking; my bewildered self is being addressed.

Jesus," said my father, when I called to tell him I'd been hired to write for The New Yorker. "Well, nowhere to go but down.

The Van Dykes had determined that America was suffering from "testosterone poisoning," and vowed that they would speak to men only if they were waiters or mechanics

We waited for our periods with excitement! ...We were delighted by the different silky weaves, the various crotch-conforming shapes, and the promise they held: The future is coming.

But then, strangely, suddenly, there it was: the power to attract erotic attention, a particular kind of admiration. A kind that made you feel feminine—ladylike, even.

But mostly I learned to cook from my mother. There weren't any blintz-style lessons. I absorbed her preferences and prejudices over the years the way that I absorbed her gestures and her speech pattern, until ultimately my cooking tastes slightly but unmistakably like hers.

We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. We didn't sit around looking at screens. We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something: We were off doing whatever we wanted.

In her ninety-fourth year of life, Tanya still talks about her late husband with rancid disgust.

We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. We didn't sit around looking at screens. We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something: We were off doing whatever we wanted." I

We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising.

BUT SOMEHOW, IF YOU want to badly enough, you can always report a story. It feels like magic but it works like carpentry. You build a frame, and then you build on that, and pretty soon you have something to stand on so you can hammer away at a height that was initially out of reach.

marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness. DJ

But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the

It was as if I were a little girl again, afraid of shadows in the stucco walls of our hallway; they looked like monsters—were monsters, to me in my rigid insomniac sentinel. But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you're crazy, but maybe you're right.

Character is who you are when nobody else is watching," he wrote in one of his books—the undeniable, hokey truth.

She had her own pain. She had her own reasons. That was something I never saw clearly before motherhood flashed in front of my eyes, impairing and intensifying my vision. Nothing has looked entirely the same since.

But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you're crazy, but maybe you're right. I

Proving that you are hot, worthy of lust, and—necessarily—that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women's work.

It's just a place, not another state of being.

Women as a class have never subjugated another group; we have never marched off to wars of conquest in the name of the fatherland…those are the games men play. We see it differently. We want to be neither oppressor nor oppressed.

Sometimes our parents were dazzled by the sense of possibility they'd bestowed upon us. Other times, they were aghast to recognize their own entitlement, staring back at them magnified in the mirror of their offspring

It didn't help when Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael made his notorious comment to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: "The position of women in SNCC is prone.

I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care.

New York Times help-wanted ads, which were once arranged by gender to distinguish "women's work" from real careers.