79 Quotes by Vivian Gornick

Everyone who had ever cared to investigate the nature of human loneliness had seen that only one’s own working mind breaks the solitude of the self.

Those of us who crave the expressive but can’t shake off the melancholy walk the street.

At the very center of all human life is energy, psychic energy. It is the force of that energy that drives us, that surges continually up in us, that must repeatedly spend and renew itself in us, that must perpetually be reaching for something beyond itself in order to satisfy its own insatiable appetite.

Así que estaban los Kerner, llenos de odio, entrelazados en secreto por el espasmo sexual, y estaban mis padres, que se llamaba el uno al otro pero cuyo lecho campaba castamente en campo abierto. Abajo la casa un desastre, el marido estaba exiliado en el salón, a las posar una soñadora medio lunática; arriba todo estaba como una patena el marido en el centro de todo y la esposa, vehemente y obstinada.

I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently...

She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

The essay becomes an exercise in the meaning and value of watching a writer conquer their own sense of threat to deliver themself of their wisdom.