Ariel Levy

The 10 or 20 minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic; there is no adventure I would have traded them for.

There's two identity markers I'm sure of, and one is, I'm Jewish. And the other is, I'm a writer. There's just no arguing with either thing. I'm just Jewish.

Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.

I was never any good at keeping secrets.

I don't hear women who are less privileged thinking they're entitled to everything, whenever they want it. That's a privilege phenomenon, but it is a phenomenon.

I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who'd go to the Gobi desert pregnant.

I never understood what the big deal is about privacy.

I feel like I turn into my grandma when I'm pecking away at Twitter. And I don't care.

I don't understand the interweb.

I'm not a polemicist; I had no business writing a polemic.

Once I started getting paid to be a writer and not having lots of other gross responsibilities, like making the puzzle or whatever, then my ambition changed, and I thought, 'Now I want to be a good writer.' And that became my ambition.

I think it would be difficult to argue that I'm a net-negative for womankind. I've tried pretty hard to bring in unusual female voices and perspectives. Not just young women and not just white women, either. I don't know that I'm the best target for improvement. I don't know that I'm the problem.

People didn't like me; I was loud and aggressive. People can take it from a 42-year-old, but when you're a little kid, and people are like, 'You're loud and awful,' you think, 'I guess I am awful,' so writing and figuring out how to put things into words was the way I felt better.

This thinking that you can have every single thing you want in life is not the thinking of a feminist. It's the thinking of a toddler.

I started keeping a diary in third grade and, in solidarity with Anne Frank, gave it a name and made it my confidante. To this day, I feel comforted and relieved of loneliness, no matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen with which to record my experiences.

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.

I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort that my parents built for me in the back yard. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at ease - I was self-reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.

I was not big on playing house. I preferred make-believe that revolved around adventure, featuring pirates and knights. I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids.

I think all the time about the ways in which I'm the beneficiary of the women's movement's success.

No one could save me from the grief of losing my child or losing my first marriage. I had to do that on my own.

For 10 minutes, I was somebody's mother, and that was both the most traumatic and also the most transcendent experience of my life.

It's a profound thing to watch another human being come out of your body.

I think what's dangerous about marriage is the way it can make you feel like you've got it all wrapped up. Like you're done: you've found your spouse, you've married him or her, and you don't need to think too much more about it.

Everyone's marriage is different. But everyone's marriage is a compromise.

There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda, but it doesn't work that way.