The Rules Do Not Apply Quotes

“A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“The whole point is that everybody gets to marry the person they love.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“But the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is no adventure I would trade them for; there is no place I would rather have seen.

-Thanksgiving in Mongolia, The New Yorker, November 18, 2013 Issue”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“The counselor says that we are "at the beginning of a long, uphill journey." She says, "Relapse is a part of recovery."

I think, You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I say, "Do I look like someone who's ready for a long, uphill journey?" Lucy snickers for a second, and I love her. I lover her much more than I want to.

But I am worn down and out. The thought of another trip crushes me. I tell Lucy, You are my family. But I'm not coming with you.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Euripides wrote, “What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?” That was more like it.
Am I allowed to say “my son”? Was it not a statement of fact that I had given birth on the bathroom floor of the Blue Sky Hotel in Mongolia and watched my son live and die?”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Sex that accomplishes this kind of transfiguration is a drug. It is not an easy thing to deny yourself once you know exactly where to get it.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Finding yourself single when you’re used to being married can feel like slipping through the threads of the fabric of life. When there were two of you connected, you were big enough to stay suspended, but now you will fall through and plummet off the planet, alone. The risk is greatest when you are surrounded by intact couples and families. If you are among other single people and you feel yourself start to slip, there is always the possibility of grabbing on to another lone human.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I had traveled across Asia for six months with a backpack when I was twenty-two. My mood on those exotic days in Katmandu and Da Nang alternated between euphoria and lonely terror. I had traveler’s checks that I kept with my passport in a little sack that I wore under my T-shirt at all times, afraid that someone would snatch it and then I would be completely fucked.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers, we want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, cosiness and thrills, but we can't have it all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“But I understood, now, her dilemma. I wanted what she had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn't play by those rules.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Has my watch stopped?” she wrote. “No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else—anything else; think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“That trip was like all my life, distilled: a compulsion to thrust myself toward adventure, offset by a longing to crawl into the pouch of some benevolent kangaroo who would take me bounding, protected, through life.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.” It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“But in a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I decided early that I would be a writer when I grew up. That, I thought, was the profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God. My lined notebooks were the only place I could say as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted. To this day I feel comforted and relieved of loneliness, no matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Nature is wasteful, he had said. That’s why there are so many pinecones on the forest floor—his mother had pointed them out to him once when he was a child, and explained that nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it’s true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It’s more like, Oh, right.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“(We liked being wild, but not nearly as much as we liked being acceptable.)”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply