Bad Behavior Quotes

“At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“It's nothing serious," he said. "It's just an obsession.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won't be fit for human society.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Things are always less important once you're assured of having them.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“There are no pure people.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“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, Bad Behavior

“He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior: Stories

“I shouldn't be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. for a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Art is only good at the moment it’s done. After that it’s dead. It’s just so much dead shit. Artists are like people trying to hoard their shit.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“She couldn't tell if she was just pulling anything available into her sadness.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it's all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“One half of the face was alertly contemplating the world with expectation and confidence while the other half had fallen under the weight of it. The eyes expressed the fatigue and rancour of a small, hardworking person carrying her life around on her back like a set of symbols and circumstances that she could stand apart from and arrange.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Maybe it would be better to hold her winglike shadow safe in the lock of his memory than to touch the breathing girl and lose her.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior: Stories

“There were only a few customers in the bar; most of them were men in suits who sat there seemingly enmeshed in a web of habit and accumulated rancor that they called their personalities, so utterly unaware of their entanglement that they clearly considered themselves men of the world, even though they had long ago stopped noticing it.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior: Stories

“Women should be quiet.” It suddenly struck her that it would seem completely natural if he lunged forward and bit her face. “I agree,” she said sharply. “There aren’t many men around worth talking to.” He was nonplussed by her peevish tone. Perhaps, he thought, he’d imagined it. He hadn’t.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior: Stories

“from clerk to clerk with stacks of papers. ‘Whenever any of you are craving inspiration, just gaze on Ariel.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Stephanie fue vagando de conversación en conversación, notando casi con pánico que, aunque había gente interesante y agradable en la sala, la situación, que para todo el mundo parecía fácil y amistosa, le impedía conectar con lo interesante y agradable de ellos. Trató de entender por qué y no pudo, aparte de intuir que las conversaciones que se desarrollaban a su alrededor se abrían y cerraban siguiendo unas reglas sutiles pero claramente definidas que nadie le había explicado”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“They had nothing in common. In most ways he bored her. Yet when she touched him she felt a sensitivity in his body, a sense of receptivity that she rarely encountered in men. When he held her against his chest, she felt secure and protected in way that had nothing to do with his muscular body. She felt that they were nourishing each other in some important, invisible way. But they could barely hold a conversation.
At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people - intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“A memory separated from the fantasy and lingered.
“I love you,” said Sara.
“It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.”
“No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips, and her tenderness pierced him.
The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned-off TV.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“She talked to him as they touched, and her crude, frank words were like pungent flowers against the gray of her shyness. When he touched her hips, he thought he could feel her innermost life on the sensitive surface of her body.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn't so bad.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive snatch. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it’s little to see how it felt, then let it go.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“He was enjoying himself now. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior

“This kind of thing kept occurring all week. Each time, the lawyer’s irritation and disbelief mounted. In addition, I sensed something else growing in him, and intimate tendril creeping from one of this darker areas, nursed on the feeling that he had discovered something about me.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior