94 Quotes by Mary Gaitskill

At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.

...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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I remember the time I said, ‘I don’t think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.’

In my diary I wrote, “I fear my father’s anger, but I fear my mother’s love.