The Rules Do Not Apply Quotes

“I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism. —”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It’s like having a new lover—even the parts you aren’t crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“When I was young. When I had no idea that all over the city, all over the world, there were people walking around sealed in their own universes of loss, independent solar systems of suffering closed off from the regular world, where things make sense and language is all you need to tell the truth. —”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I asked her if she'd ever wanted children. She told me, "Everybody doesn't get everything." It sounded depressing to me at the time, a statement of defeat. Now admitting it seems like the obvious and essential work of growing up. Everybody doesn't get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful turn to God.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“There were shadows I saw out of the corner of my eye that looked like problems waiting to become real, but you never know with shadows.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“It is not a good feeling being right about something you have suspected when you finally gain undeniable confirmation that it's true. It is not the satisfying sensation of everything slipping into place for which you have yearned. It's more like, 'Oh, right.' The man who has been staying over your whole life long is your mother's lover. The reason Lucy seems off sometimes is that she's still drinking. You have always known this. The only thing that's mysterious is how you managed to think it mysterious.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one. You want more: more love, more sex, more attention, more fun. You want someone to look at you with lust - after years of laundry - transforming you into something radiant. You want it, you need it, you owe it yourself to get it. To live any other way is to be muffled and gray and marching meaninglessly toward death. You want what she gave you at the start (but what you had hoped would expand and intensify instead of shrinking until you find yourself so sad, so resentful, you can barely stand to be you).

You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“People sometimes tells me that they're baffled by bisexuality. They are convinced that having sex with women is totally different from having sex with men. But it isn't. No more than having sex with anyone is totally different from having sex with anyone else.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism—a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Writing was the solution to every problem—financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: “You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“It was fun. Sort of. The reason it was only sort of fun was that my life had collapsed. Unlike the people at the party, with their homes full of spouses and children, I was as alone and unmoored as I’d been twenty years ago, in these same suburbs, hanging out with the same boys. In the intervening decades, I’d thought I was going somewhere. But I had just been driving around.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Or maybe it was too late, and I had already chosen, inadvertently and incrementally, to be something else.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I cried only once during the twenty-one-hour flight. I was looking out the window at the moon and thinking of the last long trip I took across the sky, and of the person who went with me and didn't come back. For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body. And it was again nature herself.

Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Even if one life is manifest and the other is mostly hypothetical, the inability to occupy your own reality is torment, is torture. It is sin and punishment all in one.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“...nature starts many more projects than she can ever finish.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Pregnancy—we were taught, if we were privileged—was something awful that went with sex, just as AIDS and genital warts went with sex, unless you used condoms (and even then, be really careful). It was made clear that sexually transmitted diseases and teen pregnancy were simply not for us: We were to use birth control and go to college and if we somehow got pregnant too soon or with the wrong guy, we were to abort. There was no mention of the possibility that we might want to get pregnant too late. From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left there to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then—abruptly, horrifyingly—it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon! It was time to rouse it, get it ready for action. But the beast had not grown stronger during the decades of hibernation. By the time we tried to wake it, the dragon was weakened, wizened. Old.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“John Updike wrote that marriage is like two people locked up with one lesson to read, over and over, until the words become madness.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love the most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“My pristine grief was intermittently marred by dread. I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“I wanted what she [her mother] had wanted, what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safely and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Thank God for the cats, I thought, when they had the compassion to sleep next to me on the couch, or looked on curious but unfazed as I bawled. They were good companions to have in this strange new world of grief: nonverbal, affectionate, no more baffled by agony than they were by dishwashing.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply

“Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable.”
― Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply