Gaitskill Quotes

But life can give a lot. If you can't see inside the heart no matter how you look, then why not look? Why not see as much as you can? How is that disrespectful? If you are only given one look, shouldn't you look as fully as you can? ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

Of course there's something there; unfortunately, there's always something 'there.' Something you will one day be sorry you saw. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I had a strong conviction that there was something out there in the world that was wonderful. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

There are no pure people. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

It's true that your environment influences how you write. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

Death is a big theme in the book, illness. What is that? It's a fact that human beings - no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are - are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that's a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

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

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

It was like everything that supported the relationship was coming from the outside. Judging by all the signs, we were a perfectly successful couple and John was an ideal husband for me - rich, blond, tall, sensitive, ad nauseam. But even worse, it seemed as if our most intimate conversations were based on what we were supposed to be saying, and what we were supposed to be. Nothing seemed to come directly from us. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

My ambition was to live like music. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don't even know what it is, or what it's for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass. ~ Mary Gaitskill

He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

When looking out the window and watching the water becomes a drama, then literally everything is a drama. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

Music is a form that tends to give shape to rules, social mores, social attitudes, feelings - it does this in a very beautiful, fluid way. To me the issue of form and formlessness is most strong in the theme of mortality versus a human wish for immortality of a sort. Take, for example, the definition of beauty in fashion. Remember what Alison says at the beginning? She says when she was young she didn't know what beautiful was. She looked at this woman who everyone was saying was beautiful and she didn't even know what they were talking about. I experienced that when I was a child. If I loved someone I thought they were really beautiful. And then eventually, I began to get it, the social concept of beauty. Not that I think beautiful is completely imaginary, but beauty is so wide ranging and fluid. Yet there's a need to say: "This is what it is, and it's not changing; we're taking a picture of it to hold it still." It's like an impulse to put up a building meant to last forever. An urge to grab and hold something in place when nothing human can be grabbed and held in place. We come into these physical bodies . . . whatever we are takes this shape that is so particular and distinct - eyes, nose, mouth - and then it gradually begins to disintegrate. Eventually it's going to dissolve completely. It's a huge problem for people; we can understand it, but it breaks our hearts. And so we're constantly trying to pin something down or leave a trace that will last forever. "And this is ~ Mary Gaitskill

The most rigid pattern was not the one imposed by the school system or the adolescent social system. It was the pattern I made of the people around me, a mythology for their incomprehensible activity, a mythology that brought me a cramped delight, which I protected by putting all possible space between myself and other people. the boundaries of my inner world did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my most external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded. ~ Mary Gaitskill

In my opinion, most of us have not been taught how to be responsible for our thoughts and feelings. I see this strongly in the widespread tendency to read books and stories as if they exist to confirm how we are supposed to be, think, and feel. I'm not talking about wacky political correctness, I'm talking mainstream ... Ladies and gentlemen, please. Stop asking, "What am I supposed to feel?" Why would an adult look to me or any other writer to tell him or her what to feel? You're not supposed to feel anything. You feel what you feel. Where you go with it is your responsibility. If a writer chooses to aggressively let you know what he or she feels, where you go with it is still your responsibility. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

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

In my diary I wrote, "I fear my father's anger, but I fear my mother's love. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Today the clerk in the fancy deli next door asked me how I was, and I said, 'I have deep longings that will never be satisfied. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

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

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

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 look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, I hope you are a savage. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I wanted to communicate and connect. I simply didn't seem able to do it. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I wanted to know people. I wanted to love. But I didn't realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn't realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn't know how to be with another person. I could only fix that person in my imagination and turn him this way and that, trying to feel him, until my mind was tired and raw. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I left the sadomasochist dump with a girl from the south of France named Simone. She was wearing a tight blue dress with red wine spilled down the front of it. She was so drunk, she didn't care. "Fuck it," she kept saying in English, "you know?" The tattooed doorman called out an endearment to us as we emerged for his cave ... We linked arms and walked. Simone was talking about her new boyfriend, but I didn't listen. I was thinking about Lisa's shame at Naxos, trying to gloat. But Alex was right- even a young girls shame could be beautiful. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

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

He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Three writers together would be a nightmare of obstreperous self-consciousness. ~ Mary Gaitskill

The best definition I've heard is that guilt is about what you've done, shame is about who you are. If something's out of my control, I don't feel shame about it, because what could I have done? If you're guilty, you can at least try to atone for it or make it better or not do it again. If it's who you are, you can't do much about it except change yourself, and that's pretty hard. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I think people try to make the most of their time on Earth and also to 'fix' their time on Earth. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

My mother looked at my image as if she were looking at a wicked little girl come to scornfully show herself to her poor mother. There was love in her look, but with such jealousy mixed in that the feelings became quickly slurred. It was what my mother gave me, so I took it and I gave it back; I reveled in her jealousy as she reveled in my vanity. Reveling and rageful, we went between sleep and dreams right there in the dining room. Silent and still, we attacked each other like animals. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

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

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

There is a sense in which we have - like, I go in to teach a class; I may be somewhat different than I would be talking to you, although it's related because it's public. I'm very different with my roommate or my lover or my cats. But I don't know if that means you're acting, really, if you're being truthful. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I think a lot of writing, or a lot of young writers, especially, hold themselves back unnecessarily because they're so upset about the idea that they might be sentimental or so concerned about being criticized that way or even being that way that they just shy away from any strong expression or emotion. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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 smiles, his almost tangible warmth and goodwill. Then something happened to awaken another need which, although it initially awoke with only the feeblest twitch, continued to twitch with larger and larger movements until I saw that it was only the smallest foreclaw of a beast that, once fully aroused, would scream unabated day and night - then sleep again forever. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Loading your brain with subliminal messages ... How loathsome to turn a sadistic murder into entertainment [in the newspaper]
and yet how hard not to read about it. What dark comedy to realize that you are scanning for descriptions of torture as you disapprove. Which of course only makes it more entertaining. "But naturally I was hoping they'd report something grisly," you say to your friends, who chuckle lighthearted acknowledgment of hypocrisy. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

When I was a kid, I did want to be a boy. I didn't like to play with dolls, and most of my friends were kind of sensitive, sissy boys. But as I got older, the mystique of being a girl began to interest me. It was confusing what sexuality was, and the responses of other people, but it didn't make me feel terrified or vulnerable. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments. ~ Mary Gaitskill

I found the world extraordinarily strange, having first left home at 15. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it. ~ Mary Gaitskill

God famously doesn't afflict Job because of anything Job has done, but because he wants to prove a point to Satan. Twenty years later, I am sympathetic with my first assessment; to me, in spite of the soft radiant beauty of many of its passages, the Bible still has a mechanical quality, a refusal to brook complexity that feels brutal and violent. There has been a change, however. When I look at Revelation now, it still seems frightening and impenetrable, and it still suggests an inexorable, ridiculous order that is unknowable by us, in which our earthly concerns matter very little. However, it not longer reads to me like a chronicle of arbitrarily inflicted cruelty. It reads like a terrible abstract of how we violate ourselves and others and thus bring down endless suffering on earth. When I read And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pain and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds, I think of myself and others I've known or know who blaspheme life itself by failing to have the courage to be honest and kind - and how then we rage around and lash out because we hurt. When I read the word fornication, I don't read it as a description of sex outside legal marriage: I read it as sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one's self or one's partner, let alone any sense of honor or even real playfulness. I still don't know what to make of much of it, but I'm inclined to read it as a writer's primitive attempt to give form to his mor ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

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

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 conceivably one reason we initiated the particularly vicious and gratuitous Iraq war―because Americans can't tolerate feeling like victims, even briefly. I think it is the reason that every boob with a hangnail has been clogging the courts and haunting talk shows across the land for the last twenty years, telling his/her "story" and trying to get redress. Whatever the suffering is, it's not to be endured, for God's sake, not felt and never, ever accepted. It's to be triumphed over. And because some things cannot be triumphed over unless they are first accepted and endured, because, indeed, some things cannot be triumphed over at all, the "story" must be told again and again in endless pursuit of a happy ending. To be human is finally to be a loser, for we are all fated to lose our carefully constructed sense of self, our physical strength, our health, our precious dignity, and finally our lives. A refusal to tolerate this reality is a refusal to tolerate life, and art based on the empowering message and positive image is just such a refusal. ~ Mary Gaitskill

When John took those naked pictures, the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.
I drop the rag in the bucket and smoke some more, ashing into the sink,. A tiny piece of the movie from the naked time plays on my eyeball: A psychotic killer is blowing up amusement parks. At the head of the crowd clamoring to ride the roller coaster is a slim, lovely man with long blond hair and floppy clothes and big, beautiful eyes fixed on a tiny strip of light that only he can see. ~ Mary Gaitskill

Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

I didn't like horses when I was a kid. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt it on her lips, he put his mouth on her lips. If he found it on the palm of her hand, he opened her hand and licked it up. Her soul darted here and there, sensitive as any creature, tipping her center of balance back and forth as it oscillated. She liked this, and if she had any fear, she did not take it seriously. He liked it, too, so much that he could barely concentrate on the chase. ~ Mary Gaitskill

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

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

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

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

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