Ariel Levy

I was never any good at keeping secrets.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.