George Sutton

“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

“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

“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

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