Mary Gordon Quotes

“People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!”

— Mary Gordon

“For the Irish, life is a matter of perpetual grievance. We remember the Famine, but forget the Draft Riots. We seal off our neighborhoods to strangers, but allow our own priests to victimize our own children. We worship violence and we enslave ourselves to alcohol, we lie and steal and kill without conscience for generations at a time. But it's all right in the end, and do you know why? Because we don't tolerate lust.”

— Mary Gordon

“All the Jane Austen in the library cannot wash the Queens from this little hand.”

— Mary Gordon

“Look, just because I'm an angry, repressed, Irish-Catholic feminist doesn't mean I hate everything. I only hate youth, beauty, the human body, nature, technological change, popular culture, and democracy. Oh, and I forgot to mention sex. And sports. And Andy Warhol. But other than that, I'm cool with whatever the kids are into. Really!”

— Mary Gordon

“My father died when I was seven. I guess I am interested in fatherlessness as a metaphor for vulnerability and unprotectedness. Being on your own in the world in a way you're not quite ready for, ever.”

— Mary Gordon

“I believe that if your primary motivation in life is to be moral, you don't become an artist.”

— Mary Gordon

I think coldness is chic among writers, and particularly ironic coldness. What is absolutely not allowable is sadness. People will do anything rather than to acknowledge that they are sad.

— Mary Gordon

My father's politics and ideas were, to me, unforgivable. He was a Jewish convert who became very anti-Semitic, and I didn't find the anti-Semitism forgivable.

— Mary Gordon

Waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.

— Mary Gordon

Everything that turned out well for me seems like a fluke. I feel like, at any moment, I could lose everything and be working at Dunkin' Donuts.

— Mary Gordon

“I don't have any great first job tales: I've never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me.”

— Mary Gordon

I love dancing; I adore salsa dancing and wish I could be in a Broadway chorus.

— Mary Gordon

“Feminism is very much a part of a lot of my student's lives, but they're not going to march about it or take a public political stance. And I think more and more young women are claiming that they're not feminists - even though they are.”

— Mary Gordon

“My mother really loved me. And one of the gifts that I have been given is that I have never thought for one second of my life that I was not greatly beloved.”

— Mary Gordon

“My weakness is 'American Idol.' My husband thinks it's ridiculous. But I am so inspired by those young people who are singing their guts out.”

— Mary Gordon

“I wasn't thinking about my pension plan until about two years ago. When I was in my twenties, the idea that you'd be thinking of taking a job based on its health-care policy was completely foreign. But these days young people are thinking about these things.”

— Mary Gordon

“I could not write without my dog, Rhoda, a Lab-chow mix.”

— Mary Gordon

“I would trade any writerly success if it would mean my children would be happy.”

— Mary Gordon

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

— Mary Gordon

“My favorite dish is bibimbap, which is composed of various vegetables, steamed and pickled, and meat toppings over a bed of rice.”

— Mary Gordon

“My life is so much better than I thought it was going to be.”

— Mary Gordon

“One should never be sexually involved with anyone one genuinely cares for. A sexual relationship guarantees a loss.”

— Mary Gordon

“We all of us deserve happiness or none of us does.”

— Mary Gordon

“'Catholic writer' seems like you have an agenda of evangelization, as if you were somehow influenced in your choice of perspective by dogma or canon law. That has nothing to do with me. I don't have a lot in common with other 'Catholic' writers.”

— Mary Gordon

If the moral good of fiction stems mainly from a habit of mind it inculcates in the reader, styles are neither good nor bad, and to describe some fictional enterprises as false is pointless.

— Mary Gordon

“In my early life, I was a professional folk singer. I used to sing on the national television and radio in Canada. Nobody knows that - but now I've said it, haven't I? I'm strictly a shower singer at the minute.”

— Mary Gordon