The Rules Do Not Apply Quotes

“I was not a key member of the staff. It was my job to take the articles the writers faxed over and type them into the computer system—it was 1996, email was still viewed as a curious phenomenon that might blow over. Also, I had to input the crossword puzzle by looking back and forth between the paper the puzzle-crafter sent me and my computer screen, trying to remember if it went black, black, white, black, or black, white, black, black. I was in a constant state of embittered self-righteousness at the office. How had I been mistaken for a charwoman? Mayita was similarly horrified by the tumble her status had taken: As a senior at Wesleyan just a few months before, she had been the next Sally Mann. Now she alphabetized negatives all day. (When we expressed subdued versions of our outrage to our elders, their responses invariably included the phrase “paying your dues.” It was not a phrase we cared for.)”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We didn’t sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. We didn’t sit around looking at screens. We didn’t wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something: We were off doing whatever we wanted.”
― 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. I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I got married a few years later—we all did. As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony. There were several years of peace, but then the pregnancies started popping. I found this unsettling.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Writing was the solution to every problem.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“It's just a place, not another state of being.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I asked if she’d ever wanted children. She told me, “Everybody doesn’t get everything.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“She said, “Everything happens for a reason.” Technically, that is a statement of fact. The reason I was talking to that woman was that she was friends with David. The reason she was friends with David was that he’d moved to the suburbs, where he didn’t know anyone. The reason he didn’t know anyone was that his best friends (his real friends) had grown up with him in those same suburbs and vowed never to return, because even though Westchester is tranquil and wonderfully vegetated, there is an empty stillness that falls there every day from New Year’s until the crocuses come up that can suck the joy right out of life. Was that what she meant?”
― 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.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: “You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“My competent self is doing the talking; my bewildered self is being addressed.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn’t working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol. It was almost a sport. We tore through sobriety together, drink by drink, until we occupied a separate reality from the rest of the world.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We shared an explosive enthusiasm that we blasted out of our bodies with alcohol.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We decided to get another cat—no, two! A pair of tiny, spotted sisters from an animal shelter on Long Island. We brought them home in a cardboard box punched with holes that they poked their noses through. They ran around the house curious, fearless, and then abruptly collapsed, always right next to each other. They did everything that way: They ate and drank in unison; they got in the litter box at the same time, like a two-headed kitten. Paolo would have sneered at their sweetness. When Lucy was holding them, carefully clipping their nails, combing their fluff, she was the benevolent person I had met on the night of the blackout: Boy Scout Lady. She was the promise of family, decency, kin. And we were a kind of family now—they were only cats, but they were ours, new lives that we were taking on the care of, together. They slept in the bed with us and followed us around from room to room, except sometimes when we crossed paths with them and they looked at us as if they were seeing—for the first time in their lives—creatures so terrifying, so dangerous, they could barely stand to know that we existed. Then they went flying for the closets, where they hid until they were ready to recognize us again for who we were: the people who waited on them and met their every need. Their love slaves.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“we were taking on the care of, together. They slept in the bed with us and followed us around from room to room, except sometimes when we crossed paths with them and they looked at us as if they were seeing—for the first time in their lives—creatures so terrifying, so dangerous, they could barely stand to know that we existed. Then they went flying for the closets, where they hid until they were ready to recognize us again for who we were: the people who waited on them and met their every need.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness. DJ”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We didn’t sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. We didn’t sit around looking at screens. We didn’t wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something: We were off doing whatever we wanted.” I”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“chest—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. What”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“All of my conjuring had led only to ruin and death. Now I was a wounded witch, waiting in the forest, undone.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“But you can never tell with shadows. You have to be vigilant, always, because maybe you’re crazy, but maybe you’re right. I”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“But the danger that we invite into our lives can come in the most unthreatening shape, the”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply