M Waldman Quotes

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. ~ Ayelet Waldman

I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it's so rich. The doors keep opening. ~ Anne Waldman

At that moment in her life, Elisa was, he realized, almost pathologically attracted not to status or money or good looks but to literary and intellectual potential. ~ Adelle Waldman

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.' ~ Ayelet Waldman

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances. ~ Amy Waldman

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy. ~ Anne Waldman

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story. ~ Anne Waldman

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well. ~ Anne Waldman

For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years. ~ Anne Waldman

It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work. ~ Anne Waldman

Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn't the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the "intuitive" also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick. ~ Adelle Waldman

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge. ~ Amy Waldman

I wrote three novels in six months, with a clarity of focus and attention to detail that I had never before experienced. This type of sublime creative energy is characteristic of the elevated and productive mood state known as hypomania. ~ Ayelet Waldman

How many people will die, have died, because of the wasted talents of intelligent and gifted women, forced into domestic drudgery, corseted by paternal demands, strangled by denial of opportunity? ~ Ayelet Waldman

The more furious he became at the perverse machinery of the military, the more his belt buckle gleamed, as if to prove that it wasn't he who was unfit for the service but the service that was unfit for him. When ~ Ayelet Waldman

I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America. ~ Anne Waldman

In the end the real wealth of the Hungarian Jewish community had not been packed in crates and boxes and loaded onto that train. What is the value to a daughter of a single pair of Sabbath candlesticks passed down from her mother and grandmother before her, generation behind generation, for a hundred, even a thousand, years? Beyond price, beyond measure. And what of ten thousand pairs of similar candlesticks, when all the grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are dead? No more than the smelted weight of the silver. The wealth of the Jews of Hungary, of all of Europe, was to be found not in the laden boxcars of the Gold Train but in the grandmothers and mothers and daughters themselves, in the doctors and lawyers, the grain dealers and psychiatrists, the writers and artists who had created a culture of sophistication, of intellectual and artistic achievement. And that wealth, everything of real value, was all but extinguished. ~ Ayelet Waldman

As he tore his eyes from the books to meet hers, he was, as a matter of fact, nearly overwhelmed by sadness. It gusted over him. He felt almost unbearably lonely. He wondered if he was flawed on some deep level, whether – in spite of all the friends who seemed to think he was a good guy (and he was a pretty good friend), in spite of being a fairly decent son – there was something terribly wrong with him. Did romance reveal some truth, fundamental lack, a coldness, that made him shrink back at just the moment when reciprocity was called for? ~ Adelle Waldman

While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated. ~ Amy Waldman

A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible. ~ Anne Waldman

I'm sure a lot of it is my fault," he said. He smiled ruefully. "And by a lot, I mean all."
"Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine," Hannah said. " 'What a lovable fuck-up I am.' The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn't get me anything. ~ Adelle Waldman

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.' ~ Ayelet Waldman

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

Those of us whose parenting style can be described as "a series of reflexes, instincts, and minute-by-minute adjustments," as Julie of A Little Pregnant puts it, rather than as a philosophy, are less invested in our own practices. What we do is often less a matter of conviction than one of convenience. What we need to remember is that there is no need to apologize for that, even in the face of the most red-faced outrage. ~ Ayelet Waldman

My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality. ~ Anne Waldman

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land. ~ Anne Waldman

Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism. ~ Amy Waldman

Jefferson believed that a secret to religious freedom was destroying the concept of heresy, the crime of expressing unauthorized religious thought. And he cared deeply - personally, passionately - about heresy because, in the context of his times, Thomas Jefferson as a heretic, and wanted to live in a nation that tolerated men like him. ~ Steven Waldman

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism. ~ Anne Waldman

[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind. ~ Anne Waldman

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together. ~ Anne Waldman

I did go to Vietnam in 2000 as a kind of pilgrimage and to feel my generation was very much a part of this. I felt responsible but also connected and empathetic. It was a very complicated relationship we had, whichever side you were on. The shock of being there was very few people my own age - I was primarily in the North in the streets of Hanoi. A whole generation was essentially decimated. ~ Anne Waldman

I mean, I do actually think there is a qualitative difference between aborting in the early part of the first trimester and in, you know, the middle or later part of the second trimester, in a way that you feel about it in that you grow attached. ~ Ayelet Waldman

In light of the unbroken record of invoking God's name in foundational documents throughout the world, throughout the colonies, and throughout history, the stubborn refusal of the US Constitution to invoke the Almighty is abnormal, historic, radical, and not accidental. But liberals miss a basic point, too: The framers of the Constitution were not contemplating the role of "government" in religion. They were debating the role of the national government in religion. ~ Steven Waldman

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. ~ Ayelet Waldman

I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on. ~ Anne Waldman

through the transcript. Some colleagues, at least, found the whole exercise droll. Fisher Ames, a Federalist ~ Michael Waldman

I read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot; the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels. ~ Amy Waldman

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. ~ Ayelet Waldman

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace. ~ Amy Waldman

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. ~ Ayelet Waldman

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment. ~ Anne Waldman

I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.' ~ Anne Waldman

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus. ~ Ayelet Waldman

I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation. ~ Anne Waldman