Ayelet Waldman Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“If you focus all of your emotional passion on your children and you neglect the relationship that brought that family into existence... eventually, things can go really, really wrong,”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Children #Passion #Emotional

“I mean, I absolutely call myself a feminist. And by that, I mean a woman who believes that your opportunities should not be constrained by your gender, that women should be entitled to the same opportunities as men.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Believe #Mean #Opportunity

“Why is it that loving something provides such little protection from betrayal?”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Betrayal #Littles #Protection

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Mother #Children #Fall

“There are times as a parent when you realize that your job is not to be the parent you always imagined you'd be, the parent you always wished you had. Your job is to be the parent your child needs, given the particulars of his or her own life and nature.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Jobs #Children #Parent

“I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Mother #Children #Thinking

“I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Children #Hate #Book

“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

#Happiness #Children #Valentine

“In a perfect world, probably we'd never yell, we'd just be firm and dispassionate. But of course, everyone yells at their children.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Children #Perfect #World

“I love reader mail, and I do read it, but I won't read hate mail.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Hate #Mail #Reader

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Daughter #Mother #Two

“As a parent, the only thing I am absolutely certain of is my own fallibility.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Parent #Certain #Fallibility

“Perhaps my children will one day pledge their loyalty to the Republican Party. Or perhaps they'll dismiss my liberalism as mild pap, and become anarchists. Either way may well be a reaction to my manipulation, my values. We are all the product of the indoctrination we received at the hands of our parents, even when we are repudiating that ideology.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Loyalty #Children #Party

“A good mother remembers to serve fruit at breakfast, is always cheerful and never yells, manages not to project her own neuroses and inadequacies onto her children, is an active and beloved community volunteer. She remembers to make play dates, her children's clothes fit, she does art projects with them and enjoys all their games.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Love #Mother #Art

“If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Mother #Children #Husband

“I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Regret #Guilt #Energy

“I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Inspirational #Funny #Graduation

“I learned that I suffered from bipolar II disorder, a less serious variant of bipolar I, which was once known as manic depression. The information was naturally frightening; up to 1 in 5 people with bipolar disorder will commit suicide, and rates may even be higher for those suffering from bipolar II.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Suicide #People #Bipolar

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Abortion #Growing #Helping

“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.'”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Thinking #Listening #Despair

“I certainly don't think it's inevitable that we don't love children who don't carry our own DNA. If that were true we wouldn't have millions of successful adoptions to consider. I do think that it's harder to love a child when you come into that child's life after the unrequited passion of infancy and early childhood has passed.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Children #Passion #Successful

“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

#Kids #Weekend #Years

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Mother #Children #Mistake

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Beautiful #Thinking #Different

“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

#Mean #Thinking #Differences

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Children #Pregnancy #Four

“I love my husband more than I love my children,”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Children #Husband #I Love My Husband

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Motherhood #Issues #Expectations

“Think about it, I say. 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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Mother #Son #Gay

“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.”
-- Ayelet Waldman

#Children #Kids #Emotional