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What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

Vivian Gornick

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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Solitude
Pleasure
Knowledge
Pain
Come
Self
Mean
Independence

More quotes by 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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self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.
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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.
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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.
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For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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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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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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in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity everyone is marginal.
Vivian Gornick
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We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise. However, we cannot always depend on surprise either. This keeps us on our toes.
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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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
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The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.
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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a scientist or a writer is one who ruminates continuously on the nature of physical or imaginative life, experiences repeated relief and excitement when the insight comes, and is endlessly attracted to working out the idea.
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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That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.
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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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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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