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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 be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that

Vivian Gornick

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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Towards
Makers
Plan
Protected
Choice
Feminism
Plans
Feminist
Choices
Radical
Family
Shouldn
Illegitimate
Change
Profession
Housewife
Heart
Serve
Maker

More quotes by Vivian Gornick

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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
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They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
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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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
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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
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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You can't reduce an actual human being you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.
Vivian Gornick
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It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.
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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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
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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
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Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.
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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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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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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in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity everyone is marginal.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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... 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
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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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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