Mary Gaitskill Quotes
Everyone says 'Anna Karenina' is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.

Quotes to Explore
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If al Qaeda or any other enemy of our country manages to create a situation or explode a bomb or murder or incapacitate large numbers of our people, we cannot wait for 7 weeks of a special election in order to deal with that.
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So I went to English school, secondary English school, so forget going to Mecca for my religious education.
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In combat sports, personalities are what draw.
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Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance.
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Frank's audience doesn't care if a girl singer, a comic or an organ grinder with a monkey opens the show. They are there to see HIM.
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I try to do my best.
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Knowing policy does help make the gossip more understandable.
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I come from a generation that suffered school lessons in portacabins and crumbling hospitals. I tell you one thing, for the eighteen years they were in power the Tories did nothing to fix the roof when the sun was shining.
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History is a race between education and catastrophe.
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Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.
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In a competitive industry, only paranoid incumbents - those constantly striving for betterment - have any hope of surviving.
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Women often come up not knowing how to make decisions. We get wishy-washy. We become great wage earners - breadwinners - but we don't know how to control empires.
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A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.
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I've had a good life, and was born to and among people I've admired and loved.
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There's the part of my life that the public and I share together. And there's the part that's mine to keep for myself. And that's mine. For me.
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Contrary to what many Westerners believe, Islam has a rich tradition of secular painting in spite of its ban on images. It is only in religious rituals that the use of pictorial representation is totally prohibited.
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I want to live my life naked, with all my little naked kids naked in the garden.
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I had already played a lead on Broadway before I ever did a film. I had had three, four seasons of stock with good, fat parts, good supporting and leading parts. And I had done, oh, God, over 400 live TV shows.
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I have a strong desire to communicate what I feel about the world. That's exciting to me.
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I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.
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The illness has only made certain ambivalences I'd always been conscious of that much more acute. Life versus Death, the absolute randomness of one's position, privilege, and place, the lot one draws, and so on. It has made previously suspicious – seeming clichés seem more tolerable. Love may not be all you need, but it is certainly a necessity. My desire to survive has been exponentially magnified by the fact that there is someone intimately tangled up in me who would be left alone with the world.
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Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.
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Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.
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Everyone says 'Anna Karenina' is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.