M. Waldman Quotes

#1. Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.

Amy Waldman

#2. Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there.

Katie Hafner

#3. Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#4. But I really feel strongly that our kids do way too much homework. The research is on my side. It's easy to make a fuss when you're right. That can be the tagline of my life: 'It's Easy To Make A Fuss When You're Right.'

Ayelet Waldman

#5. I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation.

Anne Waldman

#6. So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.

Amy Waldman

#7. Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words - usually lousy ones - for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine.

Amy Waldman

#8. I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Amy Waldman

#9. Stumble on joy
the phrase had knocked something loose in him. Joy: What did it feel like? Trying to remember, he was overcome by longing. He knew satisfaction, the exhilaration of success, contentment, and happiness to the extent he could identify it. But joy?

Amy Waldman

#10. Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.

Anne Waldman

#11. Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.

Ayelet Waldman

#12. Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a tooth for a tooth?

Ayelet Waldman

#13. through the transcript. Some colleagues, at least, found the whole exercise droll. Fisher Ames, a Federalist

Michael Waldman

#14. The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog.

Ayelet Waldman

#15. The belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy.

Adelle Waldman

#16. Well, you know, I was raised by a 1970s feminist. My mom had a consciousness-raising group. I used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them.

Ayelet Waldman

#17. I'm curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it's still a very lively ethos. It's a kind of practice. It's an ethos that is very sustaining.

Anne Waldman

#18. I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.

Anne Waldman

#19. The text for me is the musical score. I'm the instrument. My voice is the instrument. My voice is articulating the sounds which are coming through the imaginings and visitations in my head, and I'm making these sounds but I've selected them from an ocean of sound.

Anne Waldman

#20. I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

Amy Waldman

#21. I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

Ayelet Waldman

#22. How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I'm kidding. I'm not.

Ayelet Waldman

#23. If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

Anne Waldman

#24. I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Amy Waldman

#25. I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.

Anne Waldman

#26. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband.

Ayelet Waldman

#27. I'm sure a lot of it is my fault," he said. He smiled ruefully. "And by a lot, I mean all."
"Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine," Hannah said. " 'What a lovable fuck-up I am.' The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn't get me anything.

Adelle Waldman

#28. I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.

Anne Waldman

#29. I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.

Anne Waldman

#30. For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.

Anne Waldman

#31. I am an adamant feminist. It never occurred to me to take my husband's name when we married. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some.

Ayelet Waldman

#32. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

Anne Waldman

#33. There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.

Anne Waldman

#34. Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift.

Ayelet Waldman

#35. I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania.

Ayelet Waldman

#36. How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.

Anne Waldman

#37. A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

Anne Waldman

#38. Our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that's what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to "nature."

Anne Waldman

#39. When we choose to have an abortion, we must do so understanding the full ramifications of what we are doing. Anything less feels to me to be hypocritical, a selfish abnegation of reality and responsibility.

Ayelet Waldman

#40. I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.

Anne Waldman

#41. The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.

Anne Waldman

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

Ayelet Waldman

#43. It was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison.

Adelle Waldman

#44. And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.

Amy Waldman

#45. He had a bad habit of initially zeroing in on one or two things he liked about every new girl he found himself interested in, as if to justify his attraction.

Adelle Waldman

#46. When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

Anne Waldman

#47. I can't imagine the reading is still going on. He's written about Canada, for God's sake. How much can there be to say?

Ayelet Waldman

#48. By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.

Ayelet Waldman

#49. No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.

Anne Waldman

#50. I'd written personal essays before, but never on this scale
never so often and with such, er, honesty. (If by honesty I mean slashing my wrists and hemorrhaging all over the computer screen).

Ayelet Waldman

#51. I mean, I absolutely call myself a feminist. And by that, I mean a woman who believes that your opportunities should not be constrained by your gender, that women should be entitled to the same opportunities as men.

Ayelet Waldman

#52. As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

Anne Waldman

#53. Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn't the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the "intuitive" also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick.

Adelle Waldman

#54. The biggest challenge for any craft person or artist is to accept the constraints of their medium and make something beautiful despite them. That's kind of fun, actually.

Ayelet Waldman

#55. Let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. Failing that, let's go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another's backs.

Ayelet Waldman

#56. She ate ramen noodles from the vending machine, their texture just a few molecular recombinations from the Styrofoam cup containing them.

Amy Waldman