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.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

A wedding, a great wedding, is just a blast. A celebration of romance and community and love... What is unfun about that? Nothing.

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.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

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

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

I never understood what the big deal is about privacy.

Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy

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

Ariel Levy

I haven't really rebelled. I just think my parents were right. I never disagreed with anything that I was brought up with, in terms of their values or politics.

Ariel Levy

I'm a writer, not an activist. My job is to analyse things, to think them through and examine them.

Ariel Levy

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

Ariel Levy

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

Ariel Levy