Don't Cry Quotes

“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, Don't Cry

“Well, chaos was not unfamiliar to him. In daily life, his emotions were chaos. He let himself become a vessel for them, letting feeling roar through him, pulling him around like a kite, boiling him like water in a kettle, dissolving him in a whirl of elements.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“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, Don't Cry

“She would not show her personality, and even if she did, nobody would see it; they would be too distracted by the thought of a mechanical cunt, endlessly absorbing discharge.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt it on her lips, he put his mouth on her lips. If he found it on the palm of her hand, he opened her hand and licked it up. Her soul darted here and there, sensitive as any creature, tipping her center of balance back and forth as it oscillated. She liked this, and if she had any fear, she did not take it seriously. He liked it, too, so much that he could barely concentrate on the chase.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“She couldn't feel anything inside herself now but flat metallic strength.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“I don’t mean you should despise people for being weak, if it’s a kind of weakness they can’t help. But when they’re weak on purpose, it’s another thing. When they don’t even try. When they let people hurt them and don’t fight back. It’s gross. It’s letting down the whole human race.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“There's no love in you because there's no sex in you. Sex is light and fertility and life and communication! You only have this...pornography and submission and blackness and death! You're like a faggot!”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“...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.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“[E]very morning her body worked like the crew of a sinking ship, when all she had to do was get out the door in the morning.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry

“She doesn't think that the mean people she knows are the most passionate; they just want to laugh at everything. But then she remembers that she laughed when a boy in class played a joke on an ugly girl and made her cry.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Don't Cry