The Rules Do Not Apply Quotes

“Though Margaret has a South African accent and my mother retains a vaguely midwestern inflection, flecks of Yiddish float through both of their speech. They are the same size and shape (small, with fluffy silver heads of hair) and they both wear loose shirts and comfortable sandals.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I know that Emma feels bad about going into motherhood without me—I felt bad about going into lesbianism without her when I met my first girlfriend. We dislike being out of sync. “Do we look alike?” she used to ask people in college. “On a spectrum of heads,” my father told her once, “you’re not that far apart.” A girl at a bar in the East Village asked us, “Which one of you came up with the personality?” when we were jabbering at her one night soon after we moved to New York City. We loved that.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I felt obliged to lend her my swim trunks. Getting back entailed making our way over to the Zambian side and then walking up-river on the bank before swimming across. So there I was, a stark-naked white Rhodesian army boy escorting two girls in what was essentially enemy territory, being watched through a pair of binoculars by my commanding officer. It was on the eve of a leave period for me, which got canceled as punishment. That ended up being fortunate, because the following night a platoon of ours got ambushed and sustained heavy casualties, so having an extra medic they could fly in was useful. The rest of my war stories are really mundane and boring. Well, none of them involve red pubic hair, and I’ve always thought, ‘What’s the point of a story without that?’ Haven’t you?”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“When she finishes, several people say, “Keep coming back,” in unison. But that’s it. They don’t give her advice or respond to what she’s just said, even though her face is mottled pink and her breathing is jagged. “I’m grateful to be here,” Gavin, an older black man who is wearing a sweater vest, tells the group. I realize that I am grateful to be here, too. I’m grateful not to be yelling at Sophisticated Lucy, or to be feeling like a bad person for having just yelled at her.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“And do you know what ‘denial’ stands for?” Mallory adopts a knowing smirk, and pauses for effect. “ ‘Don’t Even Know I Am Lying.’ ” Several people issue world-weary grunts of acknowledgment. I resist the urge to point out that this kind of “know” doesn’t start with n. Mallory smiles even more sagely and tells us that “in the rooms,” she’s learned to “keep the focus on myself,” and not to obsess about her ex-husband’s drinking. She has learned to take it one day at a time, and to have faith that “wherever I am today is exactly where I need to be,” because of a “program called Al-Anon.” My head is about to explode. Why did Mallory not just say “Al-Anon”? We all know it’s “a program”—we’re fucking here, right now. Why the phrase “in the rooms,” when the perfectly normal “at meetings” already exists in English? Why all this mysterious, ridiculous qualifying, and why this reluctance to say “drinking” when we’re all here because of it?”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I’m in the wrong place. My parents never drank, and I’ve never stopped verbalizing my feelings. I have nothing in common with these people, and I dislike their awkward pidgin. I look at the clock. I have been here for five minutes, tops. I wonder if there’s a way I could find anyone in the school-chair circle attractive. (There isn’t.) I read the list on the back of the bookmark. Don’t: Be self-righteous. Try to dominate, nag, scold, or complain. Lose your temper. Try to push anyone but yourself. Keep bringing up the past. Keep checking up on the alcoholic. Wallow in self-pity.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“When we get back to the apartment, I beg Matt to put on some enormous pink pajamas with daisies all over them that my stepmother sent me for Hanukkah: “Come on—I’ve been through so much!” Eventually he gets into them, and then does the hora around my coffee table for a while. I feel less alone than I have in months. For some reason, I still have Matt. I still have Emma. I still have New York, and I am still a writer. And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“My friend David Klagsbrun, who grew up around the corner from me in Larchmont, was turning forty that winter, and Matt and I drove up for his party in Katonah, where David lived with his wife and two young sons. It was good to be back in a car with Matt, the way we used to be all the time. The summer after our freshman year of college, I worked at a French restaurant in Larchmont and Matt sold a cleaning powder for septic tanks. In the evenings after dinner he would pick me up in his gray car at my mother’s house, and I’d roll us a joint—“Don’t make it too tight, Ar,” he’d say every time, and every time I’d say, “I got it,” and almost every time I would roll too tightly—and we would smoke it as we drove past David Klagsbrun’s house, past the parochial school on Weaver Street that looked like a fire station, over the bridge near the turnoff for that ersatz Hebrew school where I went when I demanded a bat mitzvah because everybody else was having one (and where once, when I was playing Tzeitel in our production of Fiddler on the Roof, I argued with the teacher about a dramatic point and he said, exasperated, “Do you want to direct this yourself?” And I said, “God, yes”). Then we’d coast into the Manor, the section of town with yards like parks and the kind of houses that make you stare with longing even when you are nineteen years old, as we were, and want nothing more than to get the hell out of the suburbs.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“The audacity of her disintegrating at this moment. How could you do this to me? The mounting horror of her debts—loans I had been unaware of, the cost of her treatment. It was your job to make me safe. The obvious necessity to sell the house on Shelter Island to pay for everything. Is nothing mine in this world? The indignity of an addiction counselor at her rehab—a stranger!—informing me that I should not call my spouse to demand the truth when lies unfurled themselves in my head: It was not what Lucy needed.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I nodded and tried to look competent, levelheaded, sharp—like someone he might be seated next to at a dinner party. But I wasn’t really there to find out what had gone wrong. I did not care that my bloodwork had all come back normal. I didn’t care that I was “perfectly fine.” Secretly, I was still taking folic acid every day, just in case. And the only thing I wanted to learn was how to take what had happened and undo it. I knew I couldn’t say it out loud, but I stared at the doctor and willed him to answer my question: How do I get him back?”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“It seemed like sadness was leaking out of me from every orifice. I cried ferociously and without warning—in bed, at the grocery store, sitting on the subway. I could not keep the story of what had happened inside my mouth. I went to buy clothes that would fit my big body but that didn’t have bands of stretchy maternity elastic to accommodate a baby who wasn’t there. I heard myself tell a horrified saleswoman, “I don’t know what size I am, because I just had a baby. He died, but the good news is, now I’m fat.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work. Logically, I knew that the person I’d lost was not fully formed, that he was the possibility of a person. But without him I was gutted. If my baby could not somehow be returned to me, nothing would ever be right again. This bitter winter would go on forever.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“WHEN THE PAIR OF Mongolian EMTs came through the door, I stopped feeling competent and numb. One offered me a tampon, which I knew not to accept, but the realization that of the two of us I had more information stirred a sickening panic in me and I said I needed to throw up. She asked if I was drunk, and I said, offended, “No, I’m upset.” “Cry,” she said. “You just cry, cry, cry.” Her partner bent to insert a thick needle in my forearm and I wondered if it would give me Mongolian AIDS, but I felt unable to do anything but cry, cry, cry. She tried to take the baby from me, and I had an urge to bite her hand. As I lay on a gurney in the back of the ambulance with his body wrapped in a towel on top of my chest, I watched the frozen city flash by the windows. It occurred to me that perhaps I was going to go mad.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We buried Paolo with his sex bunny at the foot of a tree in the backyard, where they lie wrapped in an endless embrace in their Mexican serape. For weeks, Lucy looked like she was about to sob. Our home felt empty without that cat; we were palpably down a man. It was a wet, gray winter and it passed slowly with very little daylight. — PERIODICALLY, LUCY WOULD STILL seem drunk. I heard her entering the house while I was taking a shower one afternoon, and I came out wrapped in a yellow towel, excited to see her. But I took one look and saw that it wasn’t really her. There was a blurriness in her eyes, a vacated twist to her facial expression. I felt the floor turn to water under my feet. Lucy had vanished, and in her place someone furtive and messy was telling me things that didn’t add up. Sometimes her speech would be slurred, but usually it was subtle. Something would just be…off. Then a terrible queasiness would slither through me and come out of my mouth in different ways. Sometimes fearful, sad, pleading: “Honey, have you been drinking?” Sometimes unhinged, abject: “I can’t take this anymore.” Sometimes icy, condemning, ruthless: “You’re the worst,” I said once, and meant it. (To my best friend in the world. To the person I had slept next to on a thousand naked nights, I said, You’re the worst.)”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We separated for a while. Lucy stayed out on Shelter Island and I found an apartment in the city. Sometimes it was a relief to be on my own, not feeling (as) awful about myself, not fixated on how much she’d been drinking or what I could do to stop it. Sometimes I inhabited my life: I looked at the trees outside my window and felt unconfused. Other times I missed Lucy so much it was nauseating. But I started up my affair again. I’m separated! Why not? If I was going to suffer like this, there might as well be some kind of payoff. I would get to the bottom of it. I would get it out of my system! Addictions that are fed get worse, though, not better.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We separated for a while. Lucy stayed out on Shelter Island and I found an apartment in the city. Sometimes it was a relief to be on my own, not feeling (as) awful about myself, not fixated on how much she’d been drinking or what I could do to stop it. Sometimes I inhabited my life: I looked at the trees outside my window and felt unconfused. Other times I missed Lucy so much it was nauseating.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I could hear him denigrating Obama at the top of his lungs, which seemed to make Mary only slightly less uncomfortable than it made me. A few weeks before the trip, she said, when she was in the shower, seething about something he’d done, the words I chose him for you came up on the holy computer screen in her mind.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us. Writers may be particularly susceptible to this outlook, because we are accustomed to the power of authorship. (Even if you write nonfiction, you still control how the story unfolds.) Life was complying with my story. There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We went to her favorite restaurant, which looked like a log cabin, and ate lasagna and meatloaf and drank a bottle of Oregon pinot noir. For dessert we bought a flask of bourbon to drink on the balcony of our motel room. Sitting on plastic lawn chairs with the green polyester bedspread over our laps, we tried to figure out which of the dark figures in the sea were pelicans and which were just rocks. At first we had giddy but clear vision, but then we passed the bottle back and forth until the stars and the sand and the water blurred together.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I didn’t want her girlfriend to suffer. But I didn’t feel particularly guilty, either. They seemed so far from love, I even thought (stupidly) that the girlfriend might be happy to have Lucy taken off her hands. They had become strangers. Maybe they always had been. And we were magic.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We met in the middle of a blackout. It was searing hot and there wasn’t any running water and New York City had lost its mind. People were sweaty and edgy, thronging the streets, leaking heat and anxiety. Traffic lights dangled dead over the intersections; taxis lurched through the dark. The ATMs didn’t work and bodegas were charging insane amounts for bottled water and I was thirsty, hungover, and almost out of cash. I felt defenseless every time I walked up the ten flights to my apartment, carrying a lit candle in the ghostly stairwell. I was nearing panic when a friend called and told me he had the water back on in his building down by City Hall, and a grill out on the balcony. As I walked there, on the cobblestone street just north of Washington Square Park, past an intersection where a woman in a sundress was directing traffic, down into the lighting district—window after window teaming with powerless, shimmering chandeliers, the people in the apartments above drinking beer on their fire escapes—the city seemed less like a nightmare and more like a carnival. My friend had said he had a houseguest in town, visiting from California: Lucy. She was golden-skinned and green-eyed in her white shirt, and she smiled with all the openness in the world when I walked in the door. She had the radiant decency of a sunflower.”
― 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

“It was as if I were a little girl again, afraid of shadows in the stucco walls of our hallway; they looked like monsters—were monsters, to me in my rigid insomniac sentinel. But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you’re crazy, but maybe you’re right.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“There was a corresponding orbit of moods this obligatory food preparation induced in my mother: no-nonsense competence, spunky pride, and seething resentment. From my mother, I learned that you can make your family feel a wonderful sense of protected indulgence by cooking them something with jolly care. I also learned that you can launch a powerful campaign of resistance by mincing garlic like a martyr.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“But mostly I learned to cook from my mother. There weren’t any blintz-style lessons. I absorbed her preferences and prejudices over the years the way that I absorbed her gestures and her speech pattern, until ultimately my cooking tastes slightly but unmistakably like hers.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Up until then, my regrets had been feathery things, the regrets of a privileged child. (I should have gone on semester abroad. I should have lost my virginity to someone nice.) But on that morning, I made the first of many real mistakes that would stack up on top of one another until they blocked out the sun. I did not get mauled by an animal. I had not been mugged or assaulted in dangerous Johannesburg. I had not even failed at the unlikely task I had invented for myself when I insisted I could find my way and my story on another continent about which I knew nothing. The world had left me unscathed. But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the most pedestrian: the cellphone you press against your head, transmitting the voice of your mother, pouring radiation into your brain day after day; the little tick bite in the garden that leaves you aching and palsied for years. It can come in the form of an email from an old lover whom you have not spoken with for many years, which you receive when you are back at the lodge, sitting under a thatched roof drinking a cup of milky tea. It can come when, instead of writing to the person with whom you share a home and a history, the person you adore and have married, you write to your old lover. And you say, “Today I saw a family of lions licking each other in the yellow grass, and they looked like they were in love.” 3 My mother knew instinctively that danger could come in a friendly box from the grocery store, full of brightly colored cereal that gets inside your body and rots you quietly from the inside out. She had inherited from her own mother the immigrant’s mistrust for authority, and combined it with insurrectionary tendencies left over from her days as a student radical, and what it all added up to in the kitchen was a ban on Cheez Doodles.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Up until then, my regrets had been feathery things, the regrets of a privileged child. (I should have gone on semester abroad. I should have lost my virginity to someone nice.) But on that morning, I made the first of many real mistakes that would stack up on top of one another until they blocked out the sun. I did not get mauled by an animal. I had not been mugged or assaulted in dangerous Johannesburg. I had not even failed at the unlikely task I had invented for myself when I insisted I could find my way and my story on another continent about which I knew nothing. The world had left me unscathed. But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the most pedestrian: the cellphone you press against your head, transmitting the voice of your mother, pouring radiation into your brain day after day; the little tick bite in the garden that leaves you aching and palsied for years. It can come in the form of an email from an old lover whom you have not spoken with for many years, which you receive when you are back at the lodge, sitting under a thatched roof drinking a cup of milky tea. It can come when, instead of writing to the person with whom you share a home and a history, the person you adore and have married, you write to your old lover. And you say, “Today I saw a family of lions licking each other in the yellow grass, and they looked like they were in love.” 3 My mother knew instinctively that danger could come in a friendly box from the grocery store, full of brightly colored cereal that gets inside your body and rots you quietly from the inside out.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“BUT SOMEHOW, IF YOU want to badly enough, you can always report a story. It feels like magic but it works like carpentry. You build a frame, and then you build on that, and pretty soon you have something to stand on so you can hammer away at a height that was initially out of reach.”
― 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. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip. Sometimes, on the long flights I took for my stories, I would listen to “Beginning of a Great Adventure,” a Lou Reed song about impending parenthood: “A little me or he or she to fill up with my dreams,” he sings.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“It was very dark in there. The air smelled stagnant and sweaty and the drinks were so strong they fumed. But the women were magnificent, like enormous birds: feathery false eyelashes fluttering, tight, shiny dresses in peacock blue and canary yellow, the dim light reflecting off their sequins. Mayita and I stood out. We were puny, dressed in jeans and drab sweaters, little pigeons.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply