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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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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Rather
Scientists
Also
Heads
Live
Psychological
World
Scientist
Active
Interiority
Relation
Speculation
Writers
Ongoing
Physical
Relations
More quotes by 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
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
Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
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
Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.
Vivian Gornick
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
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
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
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
self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.
Vivian Gornick
You can't reduce an actual human being you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.
Vivian Gornick
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The difference between me in my work and the me who is here in front of you is that on the page I create a consistency, a voice that must sound really reliable whereas in person I am free - obviously! - to sound every which way.
Vivian Gornick
It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.
Vivian Gornick