Mary Gaitskill Quotes
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 acros . . . Read more

-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
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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
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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
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The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.

-Mary Gaitskill
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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 over . . . Read more

-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 co . . . Read more

-Mary Gaitskill
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 int . . . Read more

-Mary Gaitskill