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Women occupy, in great masses, the 'household tasks' of industry. They are nurses but not doctors, secretaries but not executives, researchers but not writers, workers but not managers, bookkeepers but not promoters.

Vivian Gornick

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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Great
Managers
Researchers
Tasks
Occupy
Doctors
Sexism
Workers
Masses
Writers
Nurse
Bookkeepers
Mass
Household
Secretaries
Industry
Secretary
Promoters
Women
Executives
Nurses

More quotes by Vivian Gornick

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Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.
Vivian Gornick
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You are the instrument of your own illumination.
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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.
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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Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.
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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They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
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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When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.
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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Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
Vivian Gornick