The Rules Do Not Apply Quotes

“In her ninety-fourth year of life, Tanya still talks about her late husband with rancid disgust.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“For as long as I can remember, I have felt the shtetl nipping at my heels.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“The Van Dykes had determined that America was suffering from “testosterone poisoning,” and vowed that they would speak to men only if they were waiters or mechanics”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Jesus,” said my father, when I called to tell him I’d been hired to write for The New Yorker. “Well, nowhere to go but down.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Life, so plodding and seemingly circumscribed, was labile, fragile.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Then we would go to the living room and sit on the blue couches, and Cat Stevens would sing on the record player, “I have my freedom / I can make my own rules.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Sometimes our parents were dazzled by the sense of possibility they’d bestowed upon us. Other times, they were aghast to recognize their own entitlement, staring back at them magnified in the mirror of their offspring”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing 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!”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“GRIEF IS A WORLD you walk through skinned, unshelled.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun. You want someone to look at you with lust—after years of laundry—transforming you into something radiant. You want it, you need it, you owe it to yourself to get it. To live any other way is to be muffled and gray and marching meaninglessly toward death. You want what she gave you at the start (but what you had hoped would expand and intensify instead of shrinking until you find yourself so sad, so resentful, you can barely stand to be you). You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he's really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“She had her own pain. She had her own reasons. That was something I never saw clearly before motherhood flashed in front of my eyes, impairing and intensifying my vision. Nothing has looked entirely the same since.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Finally there was a place—for everything! Lucy’s garage-sale golf clubs. The quilt with yellow stars from my stepmother. Books that we’d read, that we hadn’t yet read, that we’d never read, all on shelves. The things that for years had remained in our parents’ homes while we went about our young adulthoods inhabiting small spaces in big cities we brought to that house, and they comforted us. We were home.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I think about all the time I spent vigilant, preoccupied, trying to decipher my mother’s relationship with Marcus, Lucy’s relationship with alcohol. It had never occurred to me that both situations were whatever they were, whether I figured them out or not. And it had certainly never crossed my mind that my reaction—my suffering—was mine: something I had come up with, not something I needed to blame on anyone else.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“For some time, my life had been an ugly, roiling mess, but I was going to pull it all together at the last minute. (It was better this way! I had acted out before I had children.) I had managed to solve the Jane Austen problems that women have been confronting for centuries—securing a provider for your children, finding a mate to pass the time with, and creating a convivial home—in an entirely unconventional way. I’d had to relinquish the poisonous heat of my affair, but with every day that felt like less of a sacrifice.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Greece was falling apart. The streets of Athens were crawling with cats and dogs that people had abandoned because they could no longer afford pet food. But our hosts were jubilant.
Their family didn’t seem like a burden; it seemed like a party. The idea bloomed in my head that being ruled by something other than my own wishes and wanderlust might be a pleasure, a release.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Character is who you are when nobody else is watching,” he wrote in one of his books—the undeniable, hokey truth.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“My mother had it all wrong: to bring that into your home, where it lies on a pile of blankets in the TV room, scaring everyone, polluting everything? Misguided. Unthinkable. 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

“It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“But then, strangely, suddenly, there it was: the power to attract erotic attention, a particular kind of admiration. A kind that made you feel feminine—ladylike, even.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We waited for our periods with excitement! ...We were delighted by the different silky weaves, the various crotch-conforming shapes, and the promise they held: The future is coming.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Look at Grandma,” my mother would say. “You never want to be dependent on a man.” The fear of ending up like Tanya, cutting coupons in a one-room efficiency surrounded by strangers, made me vigilant like my parents, anxious that the poverty of our ancestors was always just one wrong move away.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I don’t want to give up my home, the garden where I can remember planting every flower, the circle of stones that marks Paolo’s resting place, where he lies in an endless embrace with his sex bunny. But it isn’t mine to keep. I want to be fertile. I never want to expire. But death comes for us. What first? What else? What next? As everything else has fallen apart, what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity. Hope. 31 The night before I left, Africa was golden and pulsating in my mind. I emptied the wool socks and maternity jeans from my suitcase, which I had shoved under the bed when I got back from Mongolia. I”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Something is happening. Something very small and very new is sending up a shoot inside of me. It’s a sprout of surrender that feels somehow indistinguishable from safety. It is not emanating from a plan. For the first time in my life, I have no plan. I want it to grow. I want it to overcome me, like a bright vine swallowing a fading tree. Also, I want my son. I want to feel his mouth on my breast. I want to teach him the names of all the plants: Alcea, Nepeta, Alchemilla, Cimicifuga. I want to see him on his father’s lap and in my mother’s arms. I will never know another day when he isn’t missing, missed. I want my son. But I can’t have him. For Lucy I feel more tenderness and intensity than I can fit inside my chest. She feels like kin—like blood. I don’t want to be without her in this life. But our marriage is over. Slowly, we will become something else to each other.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“my editor John Homans”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“The past is prelude and now we are leaving the restaurant and the fog is rolling out toward the Southern Ocean. When he kisses me, it feels natural, inevitable. It doesn’t feel like a stranger has his mouth on mine; he doesn’t taste old or male or alien. I go to see his cottage, and it is just as he described it in his letters: “I keep my horse riding tack and saddles on wooden brackets mounted on one wall, and there is usually a surfboard leaning in a corner and a wetsuit hanging in the shower. When I added the wooden loft as a bedroom, I forgot to leave space for the staircase; it now has what is essentially a ladder going up the one side. Chickens roost in the chimney’s ash trap and they emerge from their egg-laying speckled grey.” It is a home, but a wild home, cheerful, peculiar—like Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla, with a horse on the porch in an overgrown garden on the edge of town, where it “stood there ready and waiting for her.” And then what? I move to South Africa? He teaches me to ride horses and I have his baby? I become a foreign correspondent! I start a whole new life, a life I never saw coming. Either that, or I am isolated and miserable, I’ve destroyed my career, and I spend my days gathering sooty chicken eggs. A different fantasy: I fly to Cape Town. It is not as I remember it. It’s just a place, not another state of being. I am panicky and agitated. I cry without warning, and once I start, I can’t stop. It is not at all clear that my story will work out. Now I have lost my powers in that department, too. Dr. John and I make a plan to meet. But in this fantasy, I arrive at the restaurant and find it intimidating and confusing: I don’t know if I’m supposed to wait to be seated and I can’t get anyone’s attention. I’m afraid of being rude, wrong, American. When John arrives he is a stranger. I don’t know him and I don’t really like him, or worse, I can tell that he doesn’t like me. Our conversation is stilted. I know (and he suspects) that I have come all this way for an encounter that isn’t worth having, and a story that isn’t worth telling, at least not by me. I have made myself ridiculous. My losing streak continues.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“When I was in my early thirties I wrote a profile of Maureen Dowd. She was the sole female columnist at The New York Times then, and had been the second female White House correspondent in the paper’s history. She had started her career as an editorial assistant in 1974, the year I was born, and now she was fifty-three, had won the Pulitzer Prize, looked amazing, and lived alone. I remember sitting in the insanely decorated living room of her brownstone in Georgetown—the walls were blood red, the bookshelves were crowded with feathered fans, old Nancy Sinatra record jackets, a collection of bubbling motion lamps, another of mermaids, a dozen vintage martini shakers, all kinds of toy tigers—and being intoxicated by her peculiarity, independence, and success. 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

“When I hear that someone has lung cancer, did he smoke? comes into my head midway between the syllables can and cer. Obviously I don’t say it out loud, but I want to know, because I want to believe that if only my loved ones and I refrain from smoking, we will be ineligible for lung cancer (and, ideally, every other kind of cancer).”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“At Emma’s wedding, while we are eating the white cake together after my toast, she says, “Do you hate me for being pregnant?” And I tell her the truth. I feel that her child, in a lesser but still crucial way, will be mine, too. —”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply