Mary Gaitskill Quotes

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.

I viewed him romantically, but not with the expectation that anything sexual could happen between us; that didn’t occur to me. It was enough for me to be the recipient of his gallant attention, his sm...

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

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...

We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirecti...

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 tur...

The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.

Sometimes I don't know anymore if it really is love. I have been carrying it for so long.

She was starved hurting limbs.

But I think that this apparent desire to be a victim cloaks an opposing dread: that Americans are in truth profoundly, neurotically terrified of being victims, ever, in any way. This fear is conceivab...

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...

When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it's all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.

Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.

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

I loved them like you love your hand or your liver, without thinking about it or even being able to see it. But my music made that fleshly love feel dull and dumb, deep, slow, and heavy as stone. Come...

He looks like somebody wandering in a dark maze, clutching his little bit of goodness, knowing it’s all he’s got but not remembering what it is or how to use it.

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.

I stared at the objects before me: cold coffee in a cup of thick white glass, folded napkin, spoon with a liquid coffee shadow on its face. Symbols of order and humility, comfort and banality. These w...

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.