79 Quotes by Vivian Gornick
- Author Vivian Gornick
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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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- Author Vivian Gornick
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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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You can’t reduce an actual human being; you’re just writing! You’re not doing anything to another person.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in a void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom – or rather the movement towards it – that counts.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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Once again, as it has with irregular regularity throughout my waking life, that sickening sense of language buried deep within comes coursing through arms, legs, chest, throat. If only I could make it reach the brain, the conversation with myself might perhaps begin.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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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.
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- Author 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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- Author Vivian Gornick
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Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis – is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can ’make sense of it all.
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