Mary Gaitskill Quotes

Happiness, you see, its just an illusion of Fate, a heavenly sleight of hand designed to make you believe in fairy tales. But there's no happily ever after. You'll only find happy endings in books. Some books.

Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it." "Are you saying we shouldn't hope?" "I'm saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Love is a deception and a trap. Love is as big a myth that God sits with his flowing white beard in a throne and looks at us.

You want positive, go elsewhere. Go find a different lie.

I had amazing stuff happen right off the top. I thought this was how it worked. Hollywood is awesome! Cut to three years later: What happened?

There's a kind of dream that movies sell to people: You can start as the lowliest person and rise to the top. 'Hit Me' doesn't sell this fantasy.

I have had four happy days in my life, and three of them turned out to be illusions.

And if real life was like the movies, I should have lived happily ever after.

Sometimes your dreams come true, and it's a real drag.

A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

Hope is but the dream of those who wake.

You know, nothing is ever happily-ever-after. Ever.

The way to screw up somebody's life is to give them what they want.

Nobody should pin their hopes on a miracle.

We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.

Illusion is an anodyne, bred by the gap between wish and reality.

I'm not by nature a cynical person. But sometimes your expectations are different from reality.

I'm not interested in 'lovey dovey,' everything is so great in the world. That doesn't interest me at all.

Things aren't always the fairy tale that you thought they were.

There are times when I love the world and love everyone, and I want to talk to everyone, and other times when I feel really disillusioned, and like none of this is real, nothing is real around me.

Don't get any big ideas They're not gonna happen.

There’s no such thing as handsome princes, she told herself. There’s no such thing as happily ever after.

Sometimes. It was a good escape. Until, you know, it wasn‟t.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.