The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.

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

Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn’t play by those rules.

It feels like magic but it works like carpentry.

We’re just in a hell of our own making half the time.

nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.

GRIEF IS A WORLD you walk through skinned, unshelled.

My job is to interpret, and to communicate my interpretation persuasively to other people. The idea that in life, unlike in writing, the drive to analyze and influence might be something worth relinquishing was to me a revelation.

Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.

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