Quotes from Ariel Levy’s book “The Rules Do Not Apply” you should write down and keep with you always
2017 has been a dynamite year for books so far. Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply is one of our favorites. (FWIW, it’s also quite popular among our favorite female celebs.) It’s a heartbreaking memoir of love, loss, and womanhood. From the start, readers know how the book will end: with Levy losing her spouse and her pregnancy. But that doesn’t make the journey any less dazzling or page-turning.
With brutal honesty, Levy recounts assumptions from her youth and harsh lessons learned about starting over.
We laughed, cried, underlined sentences, and circled entire paragraphs. On every page, her words spoke to our heart and soul. These are our favorite quotes from The Rules Do Not Apply. Add it to your reading list ASAP!
“People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much. I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.”
“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.”
“My mother had never once been surprised when I accomplished something. She had never believed me when I told her I would fail, even when she took me to the airport with my hulking backpack when I was twenty-two and afraid of Phnom Penh, afraid of Katmandu, and, of course, so was she. She didn’t say, ‘You’re right, it’s too dangerous — let’s go home.’ She said, ‘Get on the plane. You’ll be fine.’”
“My job is to interpret, and to communicate my interpretation persuasively to other people. The idea that in life, unlike in writing, the drive to analyze and influence might be something worth relinquishing was to me a revelation.”
“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.”
“In a strange way, I am comforted by the truth. Death comes for us. You may get ten minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.”
“‘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.”
Get your copy of The Rules Do Not Apply here!
