Quotes from Ayelet Waldman

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

One of the most important things the early LSD pioneers discovered is that the personality of the researcher administering the drug had a profound effect on the experience of the patient. If the examiner was cold and distant, the subject occasionally became hostile, even paranoid. The subjects of a warm and gentle researcher almost universally experienced feelings of love and joy.

How many people will die, have died, because of the wasted talents of intelligent and gifted women, forced into domestic drudgery, corseted by paternal demands, strangled by denial of opportunity?

As if one's capacity for pain had anything to do with life's apportionment of agonies, Mr. Kimmelbrod thought. Such idiocy.

Although it's long been known that 67 percent of women's admissions to psychiatric facilities occur during the week immediately prior to menstruation, only recently have researchers begun to consider the effect of PMS on women with mood disorders.

People never bothered to pay attention to those who served them. Waiters and drivers were the most invisible people in the world.

Or the people they call terrorists. If it's you who's in the foreign country, and the people you're waiting for arguably have more of a right to be there than you do, who's the terrorist?

In 1934, Bill W., cofounder of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous], was treated for his alcoholism with a hallucinogenic belladonna alkaloid. The resulting mystical experience led him to become sober and inspired him to write the book and cofound the organization that have changed the lives of so many millions around the world. In the 1950's Bill W underwent LSD therapy, and found his experience so inspiring that the sought to have the drug made part of the AA program.

work only during the week, and even then I often find excuses not to sit down and bang out the words. I am a marvelously effective procrastinator. I get right to it. And yet, over these thirty days, I never wrote fewer than two pages a day and sometimes wrote as many as ten. I have once or twice before in my life written this much in a single month, but never with such ease and pleasure. Maybe I've turned into one of those clone robots of myself my therapist asked me to imagine! I

Frustrated at never being able to figure out which silver Prius was mine, I put a second Obama sticker on the bumper, because having only one made it indistinguishable from the rest. I suppose, if I really wanted to make it easier to find, I'd slap a National Rifle Association sticker on it.

Hallucinogens increase the interaction between serotonin, BDNF, and glutamate, which can result in people's developing a new perspective on things, including their own problems.

Your General Patton, he refused to arrest the SS because he said it would be silly to get rid of the most intelligent people in Germany. Instead, he packed the Bavarian Provincial Administration full of Nazis.

The prospect of being locked in my own, ugly mind terrifies me.

What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

Bay Area real estate is far more likely than a bad LSD trip to drive you to psychosis.

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus.

I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.

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.

Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.

If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

It's hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you're lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.

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.

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.

I love my husband more than I love my children.