Quotes from 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.

Who decides which… deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little? Is it a matter of numbers or physical mass or intelligence? If you are a little creature or a little person dying alone and in pain, you may not remember or know that you are little. If you are in enough pain, you may not remember who or what you are; you may know only your suffering, which is immense… What decides – common sense? Can common sense dictate such things?

But prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don't have to do that anymore. I don't have to do that anymore. It's my show now.

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.

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.

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.

Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.

He was enjoying himself now. 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.

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.

Of course, Veronica had a lot of smart cracks stored up. She needed them. When she didn't have them, she was naked and everybody saw.

She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn't so bad.

This kind of thing kept occurring all week. Each time, the lawyer's irritation and disbelief mounted. In addition, I sensed something else growing in him, and intimate tendril creeping from one of this darker areas, nursed on the feeling that he had discovered something about me.

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 only way to get through.

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

He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive snatch. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it's little to see how it felt, then let it go.

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, said the music, to joy and speed and secret endlessness, where everything tumbles together and attachments are not made of sad flesh.

They say dogs are man's best friend," he said. "But horses are man's best slave.

Today I'm Yours." It was a crude and romantic song. But human feeling is crude and romantic.

She was starved hurting limbs.

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.

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 watched voyeuristically, knowing I was peeping at people in the middle of a collective dream. I imagined myself among them, part of the regimental dance, the teacher's rosy heat, the huge mobile hope of happiness and vitality. And as I watched, it suddenly occurred to me I had been merely watching the world all my life.

You're not like me. No one is like me. I'm a phenomenon.

But he felt disoriented and depressed amid these shifting, lunging, grabbing people from all over the country, who had been in his life for hours and were now about to disappear, taking their personal items and habits with them.