Two Girls, Fat and Thin Quotes

“In my diary I wrote, “I fear my father’s anger, but I fear my mother’s love.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“I stared at the objects before me: cold coffee in a cup of thick white glass, folded napkin, spoon with a liquid coffee shadow on its face. Symbols of order and humility, comfort and banality. These were the things of my life; I had been sitting at these goddamn coffee tables all my life recovering from what other people had done to me.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“The most rigid pattern was not the one imposed by the school system or the adolescent social system. It was the pattern I made of the people around me, a mythology for their incomprehensible activity, a mythology that brought me a cramped delight, which I protected by putting all possible space between myself and other people. the boundaries of my inner world did not extend out, but in, so that there was a large area of blank whiteness starting at my most external self and expanding inward until it reached the tiny inner province of dazzling color and activity that it safeguarded.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“I viewed him romantically, but not with the expectation that anything sexual could happen between us; that didn’t occur to me. It was enough for me to be the recipient of his gallant attention, his smiles, his almost tangible warmth and goodwill. Then something happened to awaken another need which, although it initially awoke with only the feeblest twitch, continued to twitch with larger and larger movements until I saw that it was only the smallest foreclaw of a beast that, once fully aroused, would scream unabated day and night—then sleep again forever.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“I watched voyeuristically, knowing I was peeping at people in the middle of a collective dream. I imagined myself among them, part of the regimental dance, the teacher’s rosy heat, the huge mobile hope of happiness and vitality. And as I watched, it suddenly occurred to me I had been merely watching the world all my life.”
― Mary Gaitskill, Two Girls, Fat and Thin