Quote

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.

Mary Gaitskill

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Mary Gaitskill
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Disappointment
Waiter
Mets
Beef
Utter
Looked
Attached
Cecilia
Become
Cheese
Diner
Like
Cream
Waiters
Afternoon
Peopled
Lunch
Diners

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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.
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I know several women my age who are really poor...because they spent most of their energy taking care of children.
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When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.
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My ambition was to live like music.
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I became very aware of how important it is to connect with children - possibly for the children, if they're in the mood for that - but certainly for the adults.
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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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The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.
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Sexuality is a place where people are very vulnerable and can be experiencing and embodying very raw forces that they don't really understand and there's a question of how much you should control and how much you should play with those and what those forces really are, how you really feel about them. That's perennial.
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I focus more on the spiritual or psychic gains.
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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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I think women who are very creative and giving members of society can be respected and accepted.
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The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.
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It's bizarre: I've tried to understand why people are into Trump. I really don't think I can. I don't think it's as simple as just racism. I do think there's a fear that white people have, even if they don't have a vicious desire to do harm to black people, they fear losing their top spot.
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Death is a big theme in the book, illness. What is that? It's a fact that human beings - no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are - are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that's a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around.
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Whenever young writers ask me for advice, I always say you have to be able to take a lot of rejection because, unless you're very lucky, that's what's going to happen.
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Even happy situations can easily start to feel miserable. So, I think that people who consider themselves sophisticated or who are in fact sophisticated have come to distrust stories that are uplifting or simply stories in which the characters get what they want in the end. Because in life, what you want is never the end.
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I think if a woman is very happy with herself and at ease with her choices, it goes a long way toward making other people feel at ease with her.
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When you approach the second half of your life, you start to unconsciously consider what you're passing on. As a writer, that's obviously part of what you're doing. And as a teacher, that's another way of passing on information, history, or whatever you have.
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Human beings look so different from each other, voices are so different, everything about us is so individual, and that's so exciting and juicy and appealing, and we're attached to these things and they're so fascinating and beautiful - I don't just mean model-beautiful, but all the individual forms that people can take.
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The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
Mary Gaitskill