79 Quotes by Vivian Gornick

  • Author Vivian Gornick
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    Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that -- with or without the burden of social justice -- the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary.Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort.

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  • Author Vivian Gornick
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    What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge.

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  • Author Vivian Gornick
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    We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman’s life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.

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  • Author Vivian Gornick
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    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.

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  • Author Vivian Gornick
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    It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

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  • Author Vivian Gornick
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    The point of women’s liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, ‘Let me in, damn you, let me in!’ The point is to walk away from the world and concentrate on creating a new woman.

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  • Author Vivian Gornick
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    There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

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