Waldman Quotes

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

Sandra Tsing Loh

#2. I think there are many ways to raise great kids. From what I can tell, Ayelet Waldman's kids are interesting, strong, and happy, and if that's the case, that's good parenting.

Amy Chua

#3. 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

#4. I used to refer to myself as a 'theoretical anorexic,' just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do - they're smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too?

Ayelet Waldman

#5. Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn't begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage.

Amy Waldman

#6. The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes

Amy Waldman

#7. When the babies were very young, I found it difficult to write. I told myself each time that it would be different, I was used to it now, but with every child, for the first four months, I would accomplish nothing.

Ayelet Waldman

#8. My own husband was divorced when we met, but without kids. I don't know what I would have done if he'd had them. I got the message very early on that the worst mistake a woman can make is marrying a man with children.

Ayelet Waldman

#9. 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

#10. In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.

Amy Waldman

#11. If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy.

Adelle Waldman

#12. For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.

Anne Waldman

#13. Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'

Ayelet Waldman

#14. If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.

Anne Waldman

#15. I have two daughters and I have done everything in my power to prevent them from assimilating, even being aware of, my idiocy about my weight.

Ayelet Waldman

#16. A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.

Anne Waldman

#17. I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.

Anne Waldman

#18. 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?

Ayelet Waldman

#19. I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.

Anne Waldman

#20. I wasted years worrying about what other people thought.

Amy Waldman

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.

Anne Waldman

#24. If only shame were a reliable engine for behavior modification. All it does is make me feel bad, which inspires me to bust open a bag of cheese popcorn, which then makes me feel crappy about my weight.

Ayelet Waldman

#25. My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.

Amy Waldman

#26. I mean, I do actually think there is a qualitative difference between aborting in the early part of the first trimester and in, you know, the middle or later part of the second trimester, in a way that you feel about it in that you grow attached.

Ayelet Waldman

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

Amy Waldman

#28. My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.

Anne Waldman

#29. 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.

Ayelet Waldman

#30. The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn't do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl's mother.

Ayelet Waldman

#31. My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

Anne Waldman

#32. The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.

Anne Waldman

#33. In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.

Amy Waldman

#34. I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America.

Anne Waldman

#35. Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.

Amy Waldman

#36. We had much more imagery from Vietnam war. The media was not controlled. The storyline, the master narrative was not controlled. I thin it was some those images really radicalized people and shifted things to some extent. And the Viet Cong also, their tenacity.

Anne Waldman

#37. I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move.

Ayelet Waldman

#38. 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?

Ayelet Waldman

#39. Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion.

Ayelet Waldman

#40. People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart
but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought.

Adelle Waldman

#41. In a certain sense, it's harder for men to say no to sex than it is for women. When a woman says no, nobody's feelings are hurt. Men expect to be shot down. But when a man says no, the woman feels as if he's just said she's fat and undesirable. That makes him feel like a jerk.

Adelle Waldman

#42. The capacity for extravagant emotion that my husband finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament.

Ayelet Waldman

#43. We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest of consciousness.

Anne Waldman

#44. As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.

Amy Waldman

#45. Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it.

Anne Waldman

#46. It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.

Anne Waldman

#47. As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.

Amy Waldman

#48. At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential.

Adelle Waldman

#49. My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality.

Anne Waldman

#50. I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was 'Never Again.'

Ayelet Waldman

#51. Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.

Amy Waldman

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

Anne Waldman

#53. I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.

Anne Waldman

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Anne Waldman

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

Anne Waldman

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

Ayelet Waldman

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

Anne Waldman

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

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

Anne Waldman

#74. 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

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

Anne Waldman

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

Adelle Waldman

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

Anne Waldman

#78. While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated.

Amy Waldman

#79. The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

Ayelet Waldman

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

Ayelet Waldman

#81. I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.

Ayelet Waldman

#82. There are many times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.

Ayelet Waldman

#83. 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

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

Amy Waldman

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

Ayelet Waldman

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

Michael Waldman

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. In a perfect world, probably we'd never yell, we'd just be firm and dispassionate. But of course, everyone yells at their children.

Ayelet Waldman

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

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

Amy Waldman

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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