Top 86 Mary Gaitskill Quotes
#1. The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.
Mary Gaitskill
#2. By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.
Mary Gaitskill
#3. Monogamy is desirable for many reasons, especially in creating a stable, emotionally connected home for children. But judging from centuries of human behavior, it is also a very difficult standard to meet.
Mary Gaitskill
#4. I didn't start thinking about what I wanted to do professionally until I was 17. I was a hippie, but I did write.
Mary Gaitskill
#5. Things are always less important once you're assured of having them.
Mary Gaitskill
#6. I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it.
Mary Gaitskill
#7. There's no love in you because there's no sex in you. Sex is light and fertility and life and communication! You only have this ... pornography and submission and blackness and death! You're like a faggot!
Mary Gaitskill
#8. I don't mean you should despise people for being weak, if it's a kind of weakness they can't help. But when they're weak on purpose, it's another thing. When they don't even try. When they let people hurt them and don't fight back. It's gross. It's letting down the whole human race.
Mary Gaitskill
#9. People sometimes turn out to be almost the opposite of how they present. It isn't because they're trying to fool you or because they're hypocrites. It's because they badly want to be that thing, and so they'll try to be it.
Mary Gaitskill
#10. But now all the natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely that the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles' skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells.
Mary Gaitskill
#11. Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments.
Mary Gaitskill
#12. Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally.
Mary Gaitskill
#13. I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won't be fit for human society.
Mary Gaitskill
#14. The appeal of perfume is that it is at once ephemeral and empowering. It creates a shimmering invisible armor that lingers in a room long after its wearer has gone and infuses our imagination with a subtle power, hinting at a hidden identity.
Mary Gaitskill
#15. She doesn't think that the mean people she knows are the most passionate; they just want to laugh at everything. But then she remembers that she laughed when a boy in class played a joke on an ugly girl and made her cry.
Mary Gaitskill
#16. Married, you're basically part of the herd, and that makes life easier in a lot of ways in terms of social support. But if you're not by nature a herd animal, you start to feel like you're passing.
Mary Gaitskill
#17. Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores.
Mary Gaitskill
#18. Not being locked into one set of feelings, which you run the risk of mistaking for the truth, you have greater and more intense access to all feeling states, including those you would never choose to act out.
Mary Gaitskill
#19. Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness.
Mary Gaitskill
#20. On the rare occasions when my mother perfumed herself, she was going out, and so I rarely smelled those special scents up close on her body, except during kisses goodbye.
Mary Gaitskill
#21. What is faithfulness, anyway? Can you be unfaithful to your own feelings and faithful to someone else? Is it faithful to lie in bed night after night with someone you love but no longer desire while ardently dreaming of someone else?
Mary Gaitskill
#22. I've noticed women my age and a little younger, anywhere from 35 to 50, saying, 'Who would want to bring kids into a world like this?' Or, 'I don't want to spend my life that way. I want to do my artwork.' And they're very unapologetically stating this.
Mary Gaitskill
#23. What are you thinking? She asks.
-That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not.
Mary Gaitskill
#24. Of course there's something there; unfortunately, there's always something 'there.' Something you will one day be sorry you saw.
Mary Gaitskill
#25. I think that's the real reason, sometimes, that people talk about my stories as being scary, because if you compare what goes on in my stories to what goes on in popular movies and popular songs, it's very mild.
Mary Gaitskill
#26. Something like riding a horse - which I've recently started doing - requires courage, especially for me, as I started out being actually scared of horses.
Mary Gaitskill
#27. I feel I'm often misunderstood by critics. People project a lot or exaggerate the subjective fragility simply because it's frightening to them.
Mary Gaitskill
#28. Feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.
Mary Gaitskill
#29. People say that if you talk too much about sex, you take away the mystery. I say, if you're somebody who likes to talk, talk all you want - it's not listening. You will never take away the mystery.
Mary Gaitskill
#30. He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear.
Mary Gaitskill
#31. I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing.
Mary Gaitskill
#32. You can't tell an 18-year-old to keep it down and turn off Britney Spears or whatever it is that they listen to.
Mary Gaitskill
#33. Having watched television, I would kind of play the role or picture myself on a television show or something like that. That's maybe always been true of a certain type of kid, even before television maybe, but I think it's been amplified to an insane level.
Mary Gaitskill
#34. For two people to satisfy everything each needs for their entire lives is a tall order. Some couples may be equipped to do this. Some are not.
Mary Gaitskill
#35. I loved to read and would read anything that roused my interest, whether it was below my age level or above it, even if I could barely make sense of it.
Mary Gaitskill
#36. The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
Mary Gaitskill
#37. Everyone says 'Anna Karenina' is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.
Mary Gaitskill
#38. I think people try to make the most of their time on Earth and also to 'fix' their time on Earth.
Mary Gaitskill
#39. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.
Mary Gaitskill
#40. Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs.
Mary Gaitskill
#41. I had really wanted adventure. At the time that I ran away, lots of kids ran away from home. It was something of a social phenomenon.
Mary Gaitskill
#42. I used to start at about 10 at night and work until early morning. My preferred way to work is to start in the early afternoon and work until about 3, go do errands, have dinner, and then write for a few more hours in the evening.
Mary Gaitskill
#43. A sad person who is so involved with his sadness that he mistakes it for reality will have a hard time seeing himself as anything but sad. For him, the sadness is not a feeling that he experiences - it is him.
Mary Gaitskill
#44. Sometimes I decide I don't want to write because it isn't the thing for me to be doing right then, and I go do something else.
Mary Gaitskill
#45. My parents had met in high school and married right after my father came back from World War II. They honeymooned in Paris and returned to that city when my father, in college on the G.I. Bill, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.
Mary Gaitskill
#46. Between my hatred of mall shopping and my mother's firm ideas about how a girl should dress, my style choices were pretty unenthusiastic: plaid skirts or whatever empire-waisted thingamabob was on sale at Sears.
Mary Gaitskill
#47. Anne Frank's diary made a very big impression on me at age 12 or so.
Mary Gaitskill
#48. It's scary to me to watch the world around us get less and less physical while in the imaginary world of pop culture, aggressive impulses and fear reactions are floridly, furiously stoked and indulged.
Mary Gaitskill
#49. Dani said this woman, with whom she'd lived for two years, had never known her. "I feel like people accept the first thing I show them," she said, "and that's all I ever am to them.
Mary Gaitskill
#50. Where I grew up, in the Detroit area, there was a really good station. Sometimes you would hear songs for the first time on the radio, and if a really special song came on, somebody would turn it up, and everybody would just stop talking.
Mary Gaitskill
#51. You can teach people a lot about craft and various techniques, and you can certainly teach them to appreciate, but you cannot give them spirit or soul if it's not there.
Mary Gaitskill
#52. But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality.
Mary Gaitskill
#53. At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people - intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.
Mary Gaitskill
#54. When looking out the window and watching the water becomes a drama, then literally everything is a drama.
Mary Gaitskill
#55. One hot summer night in San Francisco, roughly 10 years ago, I was sitting in a crowded Pacific Heights restaurant when Alice Adams walked in with a man. She was about 60 at the time, and she was wearing a skirt that fell an inch or so above her knees and flat heels without stockings.
Mary Gaitskill
#56. I found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15.
Mary Gaitskill
#57. My first and strongest memories about perfume come from childhood, from my mother, and they are a complex blend of her private and public selves.
Mary Gaitskill
#59. Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'
Mary Gaitskill
#60. I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful.
Mary Gaitskill
#62. It's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an obsession.
Mary Gaitskill
#63. At 16, I was in Toronto and very shy and not hanging around with anyone who was intellectual in the slightest, so I didn't really have the means to discuss what I was seeing and feeling.
Mary Gaitskill
#64. Today I'm Yours. It was a crude and romantic song. But human feeling is crude and romantic.
Mary Gaitskill
#65. I believe that the truest parts of people can be buried, and for many different reasons.
Mary Gaitskill
#66. I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'
Mary Gaitskill
#67. The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.
Mary Gaitskill
#69. I wasn't ever anybody who had a political thing against marriage, but I just thought, 'Why would I want to do that?'
Mary Gaitskill
#70. I don't know if I can say exactly what I seek in books, but one of them would be to deepen and expand my understanding of the world.
Mary Gaitskill
#71. I didn't want to keep forcing myself to grind out book after book.
Mary Gaitskill
#72. I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.
Mary Gaitskill
#74. I think that with the proliferation of writing programs, people tend to forget that you also have to get used to working alone, and you have to be your own support.
Mary Gaitskill
#75. When I was writing 'Bad Behavior,' I was very, very quiet. I would just sit there and listen to people. And if I was out in public, I was usually quiet, and people tended to assume I was stupid because I was a young, pretty girl who's quiet.
Mary Gaitskill
#76. It's true that your environment influences how you write.
Mary Gaitskill
#77. The first person to blow up my fashion consciousness was a 14-year-old girl named Sandrine. She was the most beautiful human I had ever seen.
Mary Gaitskill
#78. Valiantly, he tried to bring his soul to life in the small thing through which it had to live, and it was crushed, again and again.
Mary Gaitskill
#79. Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially.
Mary Gaitskill
#80. The hard truth is that there are people who believe they're writers and work hard at it and are sincere about it, but they don't make it. You have to be prepared for that possibility.
Mary Gaitskill
#81. If anything is scary about my writing, it's that it's the product of a very particular vision and doesn't reference common speech that heavily. By 'common speech,' I don't mean language as much as an agreed-on way of seeing, or a shorthand.
Mary Gaitskill
#82. The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.
Mary Gaitskill
#83. I remember back in the '90s, I used to feel criticized by women for not having children. Like there must be something wrong with me.
Mary Gaitskill
#84. Perhaps it should be obvious: Adultery is a social threat that arouses raw anger and fear, which the bellicose then need to discharge rather than merely feel, traditionally on the philandering wife or the female home-wrecker.
Mary Gaitskill
#85. Well, chaos was not unfamiliar to him. In daily life, his emotions were chaos. He let himself become a vessel for them, letting feeling roar through him, pulling him around like a kite, boiling him like water in a kettle, dissolving him in a whirl of elements.
Mary Gaitskill
#86. I shouldn't be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. for a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her.
Mary Gaitskill
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