Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
Thinking
Values
Value
Lap
Life
Easy
Alive
Thoughtful
World
Tell
Alone
Solitude
Keep
Practice
Presence
Stories
Within
Letters
Thought
Hours
Inner
Whole
Story
Hour
Writing
Common
Quiet
Narrating
More quotes by Vivian Gornick
They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself. All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.
Vivian Gornick
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
You are the instrument of your own illumination.
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
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
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
in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity everyone is marginal.
Vivian Gornick
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
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
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
They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
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
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
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
It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.
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
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
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
Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
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
