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08577f7
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Of course there's something there; unfortunately, there's always something 'there.' Something you will one day be sorry you saw.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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c0a5dcc
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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.
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human-interaction
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Mary Gaitskill |
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df40635
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It's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an obsession."
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obsession
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Mary Gaitskill |
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a55d3ae
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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."
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Mary Gaitskill |
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9a32ad5
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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 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. Sh..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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e8a5821
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I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won't be fit for human society.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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ddf2f0a
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Things are always less important once you're assured of having them.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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8554c47
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There are no pure people.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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af03ddc
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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ef40631
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Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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a8c230a
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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 they'd met with utter disappointment and become attached to it.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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32c0e92
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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."
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love
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Mary Gaitskill |
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088e659
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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..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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7643364
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The place Joanne is building inside [herself] has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors and old-lady healers and people trying to love their asses and people who think they're stupid for it. In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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1ea1fa7
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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cc2caec
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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3ab0d6e
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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07be2ae
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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 it..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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ca0e86e
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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7bd88bc
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In my diary I wrote, "I fear my father's anger, but I fear my mother's love."
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Mary Gaitskill |
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1e68efb
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I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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a1ae4b8
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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 were the things of my life; I had been sitting at these goddamn coffee tables all my life recovering from what other people had done to me.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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d05cc4e
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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2755fb0
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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 a..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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694394b
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He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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bd88828
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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e0816b1
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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5f705f1
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The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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7366b78
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Sometimes I don't know anymore if it really is love. I have been carrying it for so long.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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b9e2126
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Demons lie.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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cc85f68
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Demons especially enjoy metaphors.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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862891d
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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d033861
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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.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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ca08e1d
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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 th..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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0f804b9
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She would not show her personality, and even if she did, nobody would see it; they would be too distracted by the thought of a mechanical cunt, endlessly absorbing discharge.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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a763fe1
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I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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e9faa57
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I carry love wrapped in pain. That is my treasure and soon it will be yours.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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a1de954
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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 star..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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4fa31d1
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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..
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Mary Gaitskill |
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fa2650a
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But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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40d99ec
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She couldn't feel anything inside herself now but flat metallic strength.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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bbe720d
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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!
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Mary Gaitskill |
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0eb2198
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Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores.
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Mary Gaitskill |
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9d132e9
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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 hurt them and don't fight back. It's gross. It's letting down the whole human race.
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Mary Gaitskill |