Veronica Quotes

“Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you saw.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“What are you thinking?” She asks.
-That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“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.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“The place Joanne is building inside [herself] has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors and old-lady healers and people trying to love their asses and people who think they're stupid for it. In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put on the wall. Not because it is good but because it is trying to understand something. In these rooms, there will be understanding. In these rooms, each madness and stupidity will be unfolded from its knot and smoothed with loving hands until the true thing inside lies revealed.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass, blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“But prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s my show now.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“My mother looked at my image as if she were looking at a wicked little girl come to scornfully show herself to her poor mother. There was love in her look, but with such jealousy mixed in that the feelings became quickly slurred. It was what my mother gave me, so I took it and I gave it back; I reveled in her jealousy as she reveled in my vanity. Reveling and rageful, we went between sleep and dreams right there in the dining room. Silent and still, we attacked each other like animals.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“I felt like a little piece of flesh chewed by giant teeth. I felt that everyone was being chewed.
To ease my terror, I pictured beautiful cows with liquid eyes eating acres of grass with their great loose jaws. I said to myself, Don’t be afraid. Everything is meant to be chewed, and also to keep making more flesh to be chewed. All prayer is prayer to the giant teeth. Maybe sometimes there is pity for the chewed thing, and that is what we pray to.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“He looks like somebody wandering in a dark maze, clutching his little bit of goodness, knowing it’s all he’s got but not remembering what it is or how to use it.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“Everything we did is being erased,” she said. “They’re denying it all. They’re taking it all away.” I was embarrassed; I didn’t understand. Now I understand.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“But also the whole event was trying to create this experience, this feeling that these guys were great because they were really dealing with something. Compared to you, they weren’t dealing with shit. I don’t mean just because what you’re dealing with is bad, but because it’s real.”

Veronica’s face went from bewildered to hard. “This isn’t a rock song, hon,” she said.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“when we met, I talked brightly about nothing and she let herself be drawn into bright nothingness. But I could see dark shapes moving behind her eyes.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“I don’t have anything to talk about except my new disgusting aches and pains. It’s just depressing.”

“I don’t care if it’s depressing. I want to know what’s going on with you.”

“It may not be too depressing for you, hon. But it’s too depressing for me.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“I saw other men after Patrick. They were important to me at the time, but now I can’t remember why.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“The queens danced and Veronica danced, and their dancing said, World, kiss my fat middle-aged butt.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“For the first time, it occurred to me that the unsaid things were not so bad after all. For the first time, it occurred to me that my parents had hidden their hate and pain out of love.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“I had heard a man who had AIDS interviewed on TV. He said that on top of dying he constantly had to comfort his well friends, who were terrified that he was dying, and that it was exhausting to have to do that.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“Because I had to work that night, I drank orange juice straight and wandered through the party, bored by but still accepting the expression that rose on every face as I went past. “Beautiful.” “Beautiful!” “Bee-oot-ee-fool.” The expression might be formed with wonder or contempt or warmth or disinterest, but it was still the same coin I mechanically took and tossed on the pile.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“I turned into a puppet with a giant hand inside me. Not a particular hand. Just a hand.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“Her hurt was soft and dark and it had arms to hold me as if I were an infant. I sank into her soft dark arms, into a story of a wicked little girl who stepped on a loaf and fell into a world of demons and deformed creatures.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“If they wanted to find something wrong, they’d have to look up her ass. They went  up there to serve perfection, and she mocked perfection with the shit that came out.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“Sara would be sitting on a chair at the foot of his bed, rubbing his feet. Even just walking past, I could feel her concentration; it was huge and fleshy, like her yelling.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“We glimpsed our mother’s boyfriend as he dropped her off—a dark mass of lust and need who kissed her in the car and drove away.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“We crash into one another; everything rattles and shakes like the airplane, only more, and we can’t hear one another even though we’re shouting.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“Imagine ten pictures of me at Carson Models. In nine of them, I’m a real stupid girl, but in the tenth, I’m somebody who could be a model. John was looking at the tenth one, and because he was, I did, too.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“Gangs of bikers came, huge men with a feeling of piled-up corpses inside them. One of them had a puppy with a dirty rope around its neck. Its eyes were full of misery, and when I petted it, it felt dead inside.”
― Mary Gaitskill;, Veronica

“She had put on the suit of “model” many years before and now she couldn’t take it off, and it hurt and confined her.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

“The waitress brought us an ashtray. Veronica thanked her with a zesty simper.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Veronica