94 Quotes by Mary Gaitskill

It's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an obsession.

My ambition was to live like music.

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.

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.

Her mouth smiled, smiled hard, but her eyes did not smile, ever. Her eyes watched and looked for something they knew they’d never find.

They say dogs are man’s best friend,” he said. “But horses are man’s best slave.

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.

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.

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.