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

Mary Gaitskill

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Mary Gaitskill
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Dynamic
Empathy
Ego
Impulse
Response
Call
Art
Writing
Integrating

More quotes by Mary Gaitskill

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The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
Mary Gaitskill
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If I'm meeting somebody for the first time, I don't look them up on Wikipedia, or I try not to, because I would not want somebody to be thinking they knew me based on that. It's like even private citizens have to deal with this persona phenomenon.
Mary Gaitskill
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I remember the time I said, 'I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself.'
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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My ambition was to live like music.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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I focus more on the spiritual or psychic gains.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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The only way to know whats possible is to venture past impossible.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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I think people hold back all kinds of things. And in a way, they just want to be nice. They want to be civil.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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When you're writing a story, you're creating something of an artificial ending.
Mary Gaitskill
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I don't have an opinion about whether or not politics should appear more in fiction or not, generally. I think politics are a part of life, but a part of life that most people don't think about very much, most of the time. Or, people think about it superficially and they talk about it superficially because they don't know very much.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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Point of view changes so much as time goes on. And it's important to acknowledge that the truth is multifaceted. And yet that conversation has a very different meaning now because of this whole alternative facts thing, calling everything you don't like fake news.
Mary Gaitskill