Mary Gaitskill Quotes

Feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.

Feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.

Mary Gaitskill

At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.

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

Tags: human interaction

About Author

Mary Gaitskill (born November 11, 1954) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993, 2006, 2012, 2020), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998, 2008). Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior (1988) and Veronica (2005), which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Mary Gaitskill Quotes

Feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.

At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.

About Author

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a gen...

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.

Quando ero piccola mia madre mi lesse una storia su una ragazzina cattiva. La lesse a me e a mia sorella: ce ne stavamo rannicchiate contro il suo corpo sedute sul divano, mentre lei leggeva ad alta v...

I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won't be fit for human society.

I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.

I carry love wrapped in pain. That is my treasure and soon it will be yours.

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...

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.

She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to...

Of course, not every single person was lonely, but he guessed that she was. She seemed in need of comfort and care, like a stray animal that gets fed by various kindly people but never held.

The singer's voice is thin and fake, but it's pretty, and somewhere in the fakery is the true sadness of smallness and failure and believing in beautiful things that aren't real because that's the onl...

This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional quality that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and beco...

[E]very morning her body worked like the crew of a sinking ship, when all she had to do was get out the door in the morning.

I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea.

Girl,

Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores.

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...

If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form,...