Vivian Gornick Quotes
Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.
That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.
Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.
What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge
The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that.
Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.
Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.
Scientists do what writers do. They also live with an active interiority, only the ongoing speculation in their heads is about relations in the physical world rather than the psychological one.
for me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform.
You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.
I was never an activist, in the sense that I didn't really join a lot of organizations. I wasn't out in the streets. But what I did become was a writer. My activism was in writing.
Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a relationship like any other.
I may cause someone to feel badly, not because I'm doing something to them, but because the way in which I see might cause pain. But I am not doing the hurting.
What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.
We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us on our toes.
When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There's not an 'I love you' in the world that can match it. I feel safe, excited, at peace, erotic, centered. Nothing can touch me.
The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.
in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal.
For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a fog. I had so many complicated feelings I couldn't understand.
It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.
They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.
Of course love is a force in life. People will go on falling in love forever. And more important, sexual infatuation will enrapture everyone. Otherwise, no babies!
Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.
What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.
Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.
She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?