Top 45 Ayelet Waldman Quotes

Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that’s what – that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I’m not saying that every, you know, I’m not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it’s kind of a gift.

When my first daughter was born, my husband held her in his hands and said, ‘My God, she’s so beautiful.’ I unwrapped the baby from her blankets. She was average size, with long thin fingers and a random assortment of toes. Her eyes were close set, and she had her father’s hooked nose. It looked better on him.

I tell myself that after four children my belly is already so stretched and flabby that I have to do origami to get my pants buttoned. One more pregnancy and I’d be doomed to elastic waists for the rest of my life.

I am consumed, or I have been consumed, with these issues of motherhood and the way we act out societal expectations and roles. So both my nonfiction and my fiction have been pretty much exclusively about that.

My new novel ‘Red Hook Road’ began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.

My kids are incredibly secure. More and more of their friends’ parents are divorcing, but my kids have absolute confidence that we’ll stay together forever. That goes a long, long way.

I have made so many mistakes as a mother. But the one thing that I know I do is I make sure my children know how much I love them and they are absolutely secure in that.

Roaring like a tiger turns some children into pianists who debut at Carnegie Hall but only crushes others. Coddling gives some the excuse to fail and others the chance to succeed.

Because of my bipolar disorder, I tend to these mixed states, which are depressed but loud and agitated. So I can be terribly irritable. I go to cognitive behavioral therapy in order not to yell at my children.

Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, ‘Aha, here is the story.’

I used to refer to myself as a ‘theoretical anorexic,’ just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do – they’re smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too?

Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion.

By the time the children go to bed, I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working, car pooling, building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.

The stereotypical gay man is someone whose company I enjoy, someone who makes me laugh, someone I’d want my kid to be. The stereotypical gay woman makes me insecure, conscious of my failings as a feminist.

Everyone knows now how early a fetus becomes a baby. Women who have been pregnant have seen their babies on ultrasounds. They know that there is a terrible truth to those horrific pictures the anti-choice fanatics hold up in front of abortion clinics.

I am an adamant feminist. It never occurred to me to take my husband’s name when we married. I am a supporter of abortion rights, of equal pay for equal work, of the rights of women prisoners, of all the time-honored feminist causes, and then some.

Is Valentine’s Day a day to make cupcakes with your children? No, Valentine’s is supposed to be a day about romantic love.

I had a second trimester abortion. I was pregnant with a much-wanted child who was diagnosed with a genetic abnormality. I made a choice to terminate the pregnancy. It was my third pregnancy, and I was very obviously showing. More important, I could feel the baby move.

How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I’m kidding. I’m not.

The thing is, my fantasies about being a parent always involved fighting for my unpopular child, doing for her what my own parents couldn’t do for me when I was a girl. I am so ready to be that little girl’s mother.

I always tell my kids that as soon as you have a secret, something about you that you are ashamed to have others find out, you have given other people the power to hurt you by exposing you.

My own husband was divorced when we met, but without kids. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d had them. I got the message very early on that the worst mistake a woman can make is marrying a man with children.

You can take the babushka off the Jewish mother and dress her up in a pair of Seven jeans and Marc Jacobs sling-backs, but she’s still going to expect a passel of grandkids.

I went from resenting my mother-in-law to accepting her, finally to appreciating her. What appeared to be her diffidence when I was first married, I now value as serenity.

I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won’t read hate mail.

I have two daughters and I have done everything in my power to prevent them from assimilating, even being aware of, my idiocy about my weight.

As a parent, the only thing I am absolutely certain of is my own fallibility.

I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.

I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, ‘A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.’

I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was ‘Never Again.’

It’s hard to separate your remembered childhood and its emotional legacy from the childhoods that are being lived out in your house, by your children. If you’re lucky, your kids will help you make that distinction.

Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.

In a perfect world, probably we’d never yell, we’d just be firm and dispassionate. But of course, everyone yells at their children.

I love the novel of ‘The English Patient’; I think it’s a profoundly beautiful novel. I love the movie of ‘The English Patient’; I think it’s a profoundly beautiful movie. And they’re totally different. You accept each on its own terms, and that’s kind of the ideal.

When the babies were very young, I found it difficult to write. I told myself each time that it would be different, I was used to it now, but with every child, for the first four months, I would accomplish nothing.

Well, you know, I was raised by a 1970s feminist. My mom had a consciousness-raising group. I used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them.

So many women today have become so focused on their children, they’ve developed these romantic entanglements with their children’s lives, and the husbands are secondary. They’re left out. And the romantic focus is on the children.

I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan – it was a graduation requirement.

When we choose to have an abortion, we must do so understanding the full ramifications of what we are doing. Anything less feels to me to be hypocritical, a selfish abnegation of reality and responsibility.

I feed my kids organic food and milk, but I’ve also been known to buy the odd Lunchable. My kids are not allowed to watch TV during the week, but on weekends even the 2-year-old veges out to ‘The Simpsons.’

There’s nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase ‘I told you so.’

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Personally, I think four is the perfect number of children for our particular family. Four is enough to create the frenzied cacophony that my husband and I find so joyful.

But I really feel strongly that our kids do way too much homework. The research is on my side. It’s easy to make a fuss when you’re right. That can be the tagline of my life: ‘It’s Easy To Make A Fuss When You’re Right.’