79 Quotes by Vivian Gornick
- Author Vivian Gornick
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New York isn’t jobs, they reply, it’s temperament. Most people are in New York because they need evidence – in large quantities – of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot.
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- Author 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.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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And I – the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image – I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard work.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.
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- Author 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.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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Whatever a scientist is doing – reading, cooking, talking, playing – science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind. They are the way the world is taken in; all that is seen is filtered through an everpresent scientific musing.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It’s a relationship like any other.
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- Author Vivian Gornick
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As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human – the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques – was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under.
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