Vivian Gornick Quotes
-
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.
→ -
A people who have only just begun to emerge from a state of subjugation are in no position to be even-handed ... and it takes much patience and understanding and good will on the part of the strong ones both in the subjugated group and in the group holding the power to provide an atmosphere of stability in which the frightened bravado on both sides of the fence can dissipate itself without increasing the chaos that is already intrinsic in the situation.
→ -
It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.
→ -
The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.
→ -
You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.
→ -
self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.
→ -
Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
→ -
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.
→ -
What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge
→ -
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.
→ -
I hated being "Mrs." from the first second each time. I didn't know why. All I knew was how uncomfortable it felt. I hated being one half of a couple, without understanding that it wasn't the husband or the man I hated, it was situation, the identity.
→ -
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.
→ -
Adorable in her not-very-bright submissiveness, charming in her childlike delight in shiny floors, even forgivable in her spiteful competition for the whitest, brightest wash, Madison Avenue's girl-next door is all the American male could wish for: unless, by some miscarriage, he should fancy human companionship.
→ -
Sex is the killer. Sexual love makes you feel more vulnerable than any other kind of love. That's one reason that people are so thorny and so vulnerable and so easily wounded when in love.
→ -
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!
→ -
I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.
→ -
The point of women's liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, 'Let me in, damn you, let me in!' The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.
→ -
Whatever a scientist is doing - reading, cooking, talking, playing - science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind. They are the way the world is taken in; all that is seen is filtered through an everpresent scientific musing.
→ -
The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.
→ -
For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
→ -
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.
→ -
in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal.
→ -
We all grew up so utterly vulnerable, enthralled by romantic love as we knew it. First of all, it was pounded into you every which way that you've got to get married and you've got to have babies. That you're not a natural woman if you don't. So that led to a lot of sitting by the telephone and waiting for a call. And that led you into a culture in which you were always in a subordinate position without realizing it; hamstrung, not able to take action. That was the most important thing: you were always waiting to be desired.
→ -
Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.
→ -
To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives; the work promises something incomparable: the sense of living both personally and historically. That is why science now draws to itself all kinds of people - charlatans, mediocrities, geniuses - everyone who wants to touch the flame, feel alive to the time.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The difference between me in my work and the me who is here in front of you is that on the page I create a consistency, a voice that must sound really reliable; whereas in person I am free - obviously! - to sound every which way.
→ -
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.
→ -
They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.
→
Related Authors
-
David Shields Author -
Lorin Stein Editor -
Lynne Tillman Novelist -
William Zinsser Writer -
Hope Edelman Author -
Kelly Corrigan Writer -
Michel de Montaigne Writer -
Patricia Hampl Memoirist -
Karen Russell Novelist -
Francine Prose Writer -
Laura Hillenbrand Author -
Maureen Corrigan Journalist -
Charles Baxter Author -
Louise Dickinson Rich Writer -
Stuart Dybek Writer -
Shin Kyung-sook Writer -
Anzia Yezierska Novelist -
Phillip Lopate Film critic -
Manny Farber Painter -
Annie Dillard Author