“...the men are undone by the need to master, and the women by the power of self-doubt.” — Vivian Gornick Self doubt Copy Share Image
What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge — Vivian Gornick Freedom Copy Share Image
“Una mujer sabe si ama a un hombre", decía. "Si no está segura, es que no lo ama” — Vivian Gornick Amor Copy Share Image
self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions. — Vivian Gornick Ability Copy Share Image
They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know. — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work. — Vivian Gornick Books Copy Share Image
It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply. — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought… — Vivian Gornick Desire Copy Share Image
I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it… — Vivian Gornick Books Copy Share Image
Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
What feminism did was make clear for me how much I longed for clarity. I got married twice, each time in a… — Vivian Gornick Clarity Copy Share Image
You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person. — Vivian Gornick Human beings Copy Share Image
What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
“She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one… — Vivian Gornick Heart Copy Share Image
We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us… — Vivian Gornick Change Copy Share Image
To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives; the work promises something incomparable: the sense of… — Vivian Gornick Alive Copy Share Image
Research is the live heart of the scientific life ... Greatness of position, respect for past accomplishments, the Nobel Prize itself --… — Vivian Gornick Accomplishment Copy Share Image
When cafe life thrives, talk is a shared limberness of the mind that improves appetite for conversation: an adequate sentence maker is… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of *at the time that we are… — Vivian Gornick Fun Copy Share Image
“No, what mattered here was that Alice had spent a lifetime struggling to become a conscious human being whose primary delight was… — Vivian Gornick Heart Copy Share Image
I hated being "Mrs." from the first second each time. I didn't know why. All I knew was how uncomfortable it felt.… — Vivian Gornick Couple Copy Share Image
The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's… — Vivian Gornick Engagement Copy Share Image
Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At… — Vivian Gornick Brother Copy Share Image
A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
A people who have only just begun to emerge from a state of subjugation are in no position to be even-handed ...… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money -… — Vivian Gornick Bourgeois Copy Share Image
“As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a… — Vivian Gornick City Copy Share Image
How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal… — Vivian Gornick Appetite Copy Share Image
“My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involved the expectancy. "We are one," I… — Vivian Gornick Friendship Copy Share Image
The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. ... The letter, written in absorbed… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
“Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit… — Vivian Gornick Books Copy Share Image
“All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine.” — Vivian Gornick New york Copy Share Image
in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal. — Vivian Gornick Diversity Copy Share Image
Sex is the killer. Sexual love makes you feel more vulnerable than any other kind of love. That's one reason that people… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of… — Vivian Gornick Antagonist Copy Share Image
That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know… — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us… — Vivian Gornick Art Copy Share Image
Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her… — Vivian Gornick Anxiety Copy Share Image
Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness. — Vivian Gornick Copy Share Image
