Quote

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.

Vivian Gornick

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Language
Sentence
Cafe
Made
Thrive
Thrives
Mind
Shared
Cafes
Good
Excellent
Improves
Life
Sentences
Maker
Extraordinary
Adequate
Conversation
Makers
Talk
Appetite

More quotes by Vivian Gornick

Image
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
Image
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
Image
They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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
Image
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
Image
You are the instrument of your own illumination.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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
Image
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
Image
What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge
Vivian Gornick
Image
Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Vivian Gornick
Image
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