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Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.

Vivian Gornick

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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Without
Expressiveness
Many
Longs
Mean
Carries
Much
Carrie
Love
Weight
Everyone
Lives
Means

More quotes by Vivian Gornick

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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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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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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Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.
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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!
Vivian Gornick
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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.
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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You can't reduce an actual human being you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.
Vivian Gornick
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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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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
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I don't write fiction but I do write narrative I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.
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.
Vivian Gornick
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in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity everyone is marginal.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.
Vivian Gornick
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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
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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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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
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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
Vivian Gornick