Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
Vivian Gornick
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Experience
Past
Human
Continual
Humans
Integrated
Transformation
Originals
Original
More quotes by Vivian Gornick
What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.
Vivian Gornick
It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.
Vivian Gornick
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
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
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
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
... 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
I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.
Vivian Gornick
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
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
for me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform.
Vivian Gornick
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
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
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
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
in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity everyone is marginal.
Vivian Gornick
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
What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge
Vivian Gornick
You can't reduce an actual human being you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.
Vivian Gornick
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