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Memoirist Inspirational Quotes (4576)

Page 19 of 191
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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Research is the live heart of the scientific life ... Greatness of position, respect for past accomplishments, the Nobel Prize itself -- none of these can compensate for the loss of vitality only research provides.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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Awareness of the self is more acutely at the heart of things than it has ever been before. On the foundation of self-awareness alone rest all our hopes for a new politics, a new society, a revitalized life. If we do not genuinely know ourselves, the void will now, at last, surely rise up to meet us.
Vivian Gornick
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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 emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say
Vivian Gornick
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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
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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 the thought seems once it has been articulated! As with love, politics, or friendship: readiness is all.
Vivian Gornick
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When I was very young and first worked in Hollywood, the films had bred in me one sole ambition: to get away from them to live inthe great world outside movies to meet people who created their own situations through living them who ad-libbed their own dialogue whose jokes were not the contrivance of some gag writer.
Anita Loos
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God to be God must rule the heart and transform it.
Mahatma Gandhi
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We got him to talk to a psych doctor once, the doctor asked if he heard things other people don't. Sure, Paul answered, I hear birds in the morning when everyone's sleeping, I hear trees rustling when no one's around.
Nick Flynn
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If fighting for the legislatures meant a sacrifice of truth and nonviolence, democracy would not be worth a moment's purchase.
Mahatma Gandhi
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In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them.
Pierre Trudeau
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What is imprisonment to the man who is fearless of death itself?
Mahatma Gandhi
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I hold it a blasphemy to say that the Creator resides in a temple from which a particular class of His devotees sharing faith in it are excluded.
Mahatma Gandhi
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I don't want to be someone's entertainment.
Priscilla Presley
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If we were to drive out the English with the weapons with which they enslaved us, our slavery would still be with us even when they have gone.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.
Victor Hugo
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A good woman is a hidden treasure who discovers her will do well not to boast about it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
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