Ayelet Waldman Quotes

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Ayelet Waldman

Profession : Novelist

Birth : December 11, 1964

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

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

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

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

During the periods in my marriage when I chose to stay home with my kids rather than work as an attorney, it caused me no end of anxiety. Despite the fact that I knew I was contributing to our family by caring for our children, I still felt that my worth was less because I wasn't earning.

Ayelet Waldman

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Ayelet Waldman

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

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

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.'

Ayelet Waldman

Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to help them change or do we want to help them become even more violent and dangerous?

Ayelet Waldman

If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee.

Ayelet Waldman

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

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.

Ayelet Waldman

I've sometimes thought that it's only by recalling that desperate devotion my kids once felt for me that I can maintain my own desperate devotion in the face of their adolescent sneering.

Ayelet Waldman

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

Ayelet Waldman