All Vivian Gornick Quotes
- Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of *at the time that we are reading.* How obvious… All
- Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't… Change
- Every work [of literature] has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the… Both
- A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in… Able
- What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge Independence
- You are the instrument of your own illumination. Illumination
- 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… Adorable
- 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… Counts
- 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. Able
- Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the workingclass. At a time when I… All