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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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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Love
Properties
Wondrous
Boredom
Anxiety
Indeed
Property
Cause
Compensated
Causes
Papa

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.
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For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
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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.
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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.
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self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.
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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.
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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.
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They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
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What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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