Waldman Quotes

I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon. — Anne Waldman

It was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison. — Adelle Waldman

Its walls were mirrored, its tables marble, its espresso feral, its pastry stale. — Amy Waldman

Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up. — Amy Waldman

In America time was gold; in Bangladesh, corrugated tin. — Amy Waldman

My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are. — Amy Waldman

Good drivers are people who can put their brains on cruise control. — Adelle Waldman

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances. — Amy Waldman

My teachers were often very eccentric. — Anne Waldman

Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity. — Anne Waldman

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel. — Anne Waldman

There's nothing I find quite as annoying as the phrase 'I told you so.' — Ayelet Waldman

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro. — Amy Waldman

The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes — Amy Waldman

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces. — Anne Waldman

I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct. — Anne Waldman

We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness. — Anne Waldman

Debbie's facts coincided miraculously with her opinions — Amy Waldman

I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it's so rich. The doors keep opening. — Anne Waldman

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing. — Anne Waldman

Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it. — Anne Waldman

I can't imagine the reading is still going on. He's written about Canada, for God's sake. How much can there be to say? — Ayelet Waldman

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

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end. — Amy Waldman

Well, you know, I was raised by a 1970s feminist. My mom had a consciousness-raising group. I used to sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them. — Ayelet Waldman

Sorrow can be a bully. — Amy Waldman

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace. — Amy Waldman

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

My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you believe in God? — Anne Waldman

The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog. — Ayelet Waldman

Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you. — Amy Waldman

Tears filled Claire's eyes but, as if they knew their place, didn't leave. — Amy Waldman

She ate ramen noodles from the vending machine, their texture just a few molecular recombinations from the Styrofoam cup containing them. — Amy Waldman

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration. — Anne Waldman

As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed. — Anne Waldman

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to. — Anne Waldman

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism. — Anne Waldman

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy. — Anne Waldman

It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience. — Anne 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

Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski. — Sandra Tsing Loh

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well. — Anne Waldman

If his relative success hadn't made him happy, it had, on average, made him less unhappy. — Adelle Waldman

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. — Anne Waldman

through the transcript. Some colleagues, at least, found the whole exercise droll. Fisher Ames, a Federalist — Michael Waldman

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now. — Anne Waldman

As if one's capacity for pain had anything to do with life's apportionment of agonies, Mr. Kimmelbrod thought. Such idiocy. — Ayelet Waldman

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst. — Anne Waldman

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story. — Anne Waldman

For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future. — Anne Waldman

[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it. — Amy Waldman

We need a world-wide Department of Peace. — Anne Waldman

Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge. — Amy Waldman

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone. — Anne Waldman

Smart people only mated with smart people, class structures would ossify. There'd be a permanent underclass of stupid people. — Adelle Waldman

Don't succumb to the fear; don't mistake the absolutism of Khan's opposition for morality — Amy Waldman

World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call. — Anne Waldman

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism. — Ayelet Waldman

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

I wasted years worrying about what other people thought. — Amy Waldman

If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others. — Anne Waldman

[W]hatever my intentions, whatever the truth of my claim, I had no business giving a lecture to a total stranger. — Ayelet Waldman

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

We're all in this together. — Paul Waldman

The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years. — Anne Waldman

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

We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest of consciousness. — Anne Waldman

My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence. — Ayelet Waldman

The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline. — Ayelet Waldman

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild. — Anne Waldman

Sketchbooks and journals are the street lamps that illuminate the artist's journey. — Neil Waldman

People never bothered to pay attention to those who served them. Waiters and drivers were the most invisible people in the world. — Ayelet Waldman

I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show. — Anne Waldman

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

My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality. — Anne Waldman

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper. — Ayelet Waldman

Why is it that loving something provides such little protection from betrayal? — Ayelet Waldman

You know, I feel like my job is to write a book. Then filmmakers come and they make a movie. And they're two really different art forms. — Ayelet Waldman

In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid. — Amy Waldman

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.' — Amy Waldman

I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation. — Anne Waldman

Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary. — Amy Waldman

The real act of will was not in the creating of a garden but in the sustaining, the continuous stand against wildness. — Amy Waldman

For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years. — Anne Waldman