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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.

Vivian Gornick

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Vivian Gornick
Age: 89
Born: 1935
Born: June 14
Critic
Essayist
Historian
Memoirist
The Bronx
New York City
Since
Narration
Desire
Memoirs
Ends
Modernism
Memoir
Sought
Keeps
Brought
Fiction

More quotes by 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.
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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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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 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.
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in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity everyone is marginal.
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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.
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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.
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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
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You are the instrument of your own illumination.
Vivian Gornick
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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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.
Vivian Gornick
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What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge
Vivian Gornick
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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
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self-possession is the ability to face without fear life in all its contradictions.
Vivian Gornick
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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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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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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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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
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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