Mary Gaitskill famous quotes

03-24-2025

My ambition was to live like music.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Music #Ambition #My Ambition
I think people try to make the most of their time on earth and also to fix their time on earth. They try to fix external verities, things that are true for all time, ideas that are true for all time: Rome will last forever! America will last forever! Beauty, as defined by the fashion industry, is one of those thingsâ€”this is beautiful. This will always be beautifulâ€”and hold it in a way that has some sense of permanence about it, and absoluteness. And yet itâ€™s not.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Beautiful #Fashion #Thinking
Of course thereâ€™s something there; unfortunately, thereâ€™s always something â€˜there.â€™ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Sorry #One Day #Saws
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

#Loss #Order #Turtles
The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Hurt #Childhood
She disapproved, but part of her seemed secretly to sympathize with the sickness. It was like she thought everybody had it, and the best you could do was to cover it up, and sometimes it would just come boiling out anyway. Then you had to point at it and condemn it, even though you knew you had it too.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Sometimes #Sickness
The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Art #Writing #Empathy
Somebody once said to me if you want to be understood,don't write fiction.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Writing #Fiction #Want
Dani said this woman, with whom sheâ€™d lived for two years, had never known her. â€œI feel like people accept the first thing I show them,â€ she said, â€œand thatâ€™s all I ever am to them.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Years #Two #People
He had lunch with Cecilia that afternoon. They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like theyÂ´d met with utter disappointment and become attached to it.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Disappointment #Lunch #Afternoon
When he held her that way, she felt so happy that it disturbed her. After he left, it would take her hours to fall asleep, and then when she woke up she would feel another onrush of agitated happiness, which was a lot like panic. She wished she could grab the happiness and mash it into a ball and hoard it and gloat over it, but she couldn't. It just ran around all over the place, disrupting everything.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Fall #Panic #Way
What are you thinking?â€ She asks. -That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Beautiful #Thinking #Kind
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 genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. 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, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Writing #White #Feelings
The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.
-- Mary Gaitskill

#Past #Venture #Way

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