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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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Mary Gaitskill
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: November 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Lexington
Kentucky
Spirit
Techniques
Cannot
Craft
Give
Crafts
Soul
Technique
Giving
Various
People
Appreciate
Certainly
Teach

More quotes by 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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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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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 can be very in my head, but I don't trust my head all that much. My head is crazy. My head will talk to itself all day and all night if I let it. And my heart is less nutty, but it's kind of like an overexcited child. I don't trust my heart all that much either. My body is like a good horse. I trust my body.
Mary Gaitskill
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I think women who are very creative and giving members of society can be respected and accepted.
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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The art of integrating the ego and the impulse for empathy in a dynamic call and response.
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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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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Adultery is like, here's the way it is, and here's exactly what you're supposed to do. It's like cheating at Monopoly. For me, it just doesn't apply to human relations. I mean, I use the word sometimes because it's fair and everybody knows what it means, but I find it a very irritating word.
Mary Gaitskill
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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.
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 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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The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge.
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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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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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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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.
Mary Gaitskill
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My ambition was to live like music.
Mary Gaitskill