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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
Anxiety
Indeed
Property
Cause
Compensated
Causes
Papa
Love
Properties
Wondrous
Boredom

More quotes by Vivian Gornick

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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.
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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!
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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
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Whatever a scientist is doing - reading, cooking, talking, playing - science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind. They are the way the world is taken in all that is seen is filtered through an everpresent scientific musing.
Vivian Gornick
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You are the instrument of your own illumination.
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.
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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.
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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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
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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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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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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
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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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For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
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