Quotes from Vivian Gornick

Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.

Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it. They mimic the recalled gestures and mannerisms of the women they've been trained to become and hope for the best.

the men are undone by the need to master, and the women by the power of self-doubt.

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.

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

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.

I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

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

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.

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.

Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping ground into which exceptional writers pour all the art they are capable of making.

In 1907 Edmund Gosse thought he had to leave his father to become himself; seventy years later Geoffrey Wolff knows he cannot leave his father because he has become his father.

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.

I had an affair with a downtown playwright. Two things about this man: He was an ex-alcoholic, and he was phobic about leaving the city. I was too old to think him poetic, but I did.

Min mors ønsker er simple, men de er ikke til forhandling. Hun oplever dem som nødvendigheder. Lige nu er hun nødt til at have en kop kaffe. Det vil ikke være muligt at komme uden om dette ønske, som hun kalder et behov, før hun holder kruset med den dampende varme væske i sin hånd og fører det op til munden.

It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it. (On her mother)

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.

When was the first I knew something about her in a world where men were sex, but women?—weren't we just supposed to get out of the way when we saw it coming?

If she would work he wouldn't have to keep her in the house. She wouldn't be crazy, and she could tell him to go to hell. Did you ever think about that, my brilliant daughter? That maybe she's crazy because she can't tell him to go to hell? When a woman can't tell a man to go to hell, I have noticed, she is often crazy.

Collectively speaking, if we chart the internal mood of every successful movement for social integration we find that, ironically, with each advance made it is anger—not hope, much less elation—that deepens in the petitioners at the gate. Ironic but not surprising: to petition repeatedly is to be reminded repeatedly that one is not wanted, never had been, never will be.

Una mujer sabe si ama a un hombre", decía. "Si no está segura, es que no lo ama

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.

No lo sé. Lo único que sé es que es lista, que se merece una formación y que la va a tener. Éstos son los Estados Unidos. Las chicas no son vacas que pacen a la espera de que las crucen con un toro.

We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. Under its influence we gave up neither our fears nor our angers. Within ourselves we remained unchanged. The development was an astonishment: not at all what had been expected. The atmosphere became charged with revelation, and it altered us permanently as a culture.