Mary Gordon Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“Waiting is the great vocation of the dispossessed.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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