Vivian Gornick Quotes - Page 2

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• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Ongoing, World, Psychological

  Vivian Gornick (2013). “Women in Science: Then and Now”, p.28, The Feminist Press at CUNY

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Emotional, Dry Up, Mysterious

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Work, Love You, Erotic

  4 Copy quote

• Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped the significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew--and I knew it was important to know--that Papa worked hard all day long.

  Vivian Gornick

  Girl, Brother, Work

  Vivian Gornick (1977). “The romance of American Communism”

  9 Copy quote

• The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared. To write a letter is to be alone with my thoughts in the conjured presence of another person. I keep myself imaginative company. I occupy the empty room.

  Vivian Gornick

  Loneliness, Writing, Empty Rooms

  9 Copy quote

• Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

  Vivian Gornick

  Trying, Literature, Metaphor

  Source: www.believermag.com

  8 Copy quote

• 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!

  Vivian Gornick

  Baby, Falling In Love, Love Is

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Order, Firsts, Produce

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is then made good, a good one excellent, an excellent one extraordinary.

  Vivian Gornick

  Mind, Cafes, Adequate

  Vivian Gornick (1996). “Approaching Eye Level”, Beacon Press (MA)

  30 Copy quote

• The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Novelists, Engagement

  Vivian Gornick (2002). “The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative”, p.14, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Strong, People, Understanding

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Couple, Husband, Men

  "We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". Interview with Madeleine Schwartz, believermag.com. March 24, 2014.

  6 Copy quote

• ... the whole sickening trickery in life -- the idea that one cannot fight for one's humanity without, ironically, losing it ... that trickery is the real enemy and the very essence of the thing we must continually be on our guard against.

  Vivian Gornick

  Real, Fighting, Essence

  Vivian Gornick (1978). “Essays in feminism”, HarperCollins Publishers

  7 Copy quote

• How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail's pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it.

  Vivian Gornick

  Moving, Roots, People

  7 Copy quote

• It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

  Vivian Gornick

  Fiction, Produce, Human Condition

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.

  Vivian Gornick

  Art, Book, Trying

  "We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". The Believer Interview, believermagblog.wordpress.com. March 24, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.

  Vivian Gornick

  People, Knows, Do You Know

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Sex, People, Killers

  "We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". Interview with Madeleine Schwartz, believermag.com. March 24, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.

  Vivian Gornick

  Feminism, Important, Culture

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Fog, Feelings, Feminism

  "We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". Interview with Madeleine Schwartz, believermag.com. March 24, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves.

  Vivian Gornick

  Once Upon A Time, Literature, Kind

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Humans, Persons

  "We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". The Believer Interview, believermag.com. March 24, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Writing, Organization, Activism

  Interview with Madeleine Schwartz, www.believermag.com. March 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Hurt, Pain, May

  "We knew we were not liberated and were never going to be liberated. But we knew what liberation was". The Believer Interview, believermag.com. March 24, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Vivian Gornick

  Voice, Differences, Consistency

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

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