Quotes from Vivian Gornick

Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live got to be as it is. No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.

it is the narrator who is the "agent": he himself is the unifying idea. Not through what he tells us about himself or even through what he sees as he travels, but through the way he sees what he sees. It is the character of the persona's perspective that provides the narrative its striking inner life.

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.

Durante años me dije: "Por la mañana". Lo que, claro está, nunca ocurrió.

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.

Entonces nos sentamos juntas, en silencio, sin implicarnos la una con la otra, solo dos mujeres que escrutan la oscuridad de toda esa vida perdida. Mi madre no parece ni joven ni vieja, solo profundamente absorta por lo terrible de lo que ve ante sí. Y yo no sé qué soy a sus ojos.

It's the gene for anarchy, alive in everyone born into the wrong class, the wrong color, the wrong sex — only in some it stays quiescent, while in some it makes a holocaust — no one knows this better than me.

My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involved the expectancy. "We are one," I decided shortly after we met. "You are me, and I am you, and it is our obligation to save each other." It took me years for me to realize this sentiment was off the mark. What we are, in fact, is a pair of solitary travelers slogging through the country of our lives, meeting up from time to time at the outer limit to give each other border reports.

Johnson odiaba y temía la vida en un pueblo. Las calles cerradas y silenciosas lo sumían en la desesperación. En un pueblo, su presencia no encontraba reflejo. La soledad se volvía insoportable. La ciudad tenía sentido porque hacía soportable la soledad.

People have a right to their lives,' she says softly.

We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise.

Men should discover their past. I admit to this. It has been my profession. Only so can we learn our limitations and come in time to suffer life with compassion. Nevertheless, I now believe there are occasions when … to tamper with the past, even one's own, is to bring [on] that slipping, sliding horror which revolves around all that is done, unalterable, and yet which abides unseen in the living mind … [and makes] us lonely beyond belief.

Cuando una novela nos da menos de lo que muchos de nosotros sabemos, nos hallamos ante una escritura conservada. Una escritura así está más cerca del sentimentalismo que de la realidad. El lector siente que la obra peca de sentimentalismo porque las metáforas no son precisas. Para llegar a esas terminaciones nerviosas, una metáfora ha de ser exacta, no aproximada. La metáfora exacta es el oro del escritor.

Arthur is smart and he has words, but so do I. I stood there arguing with him. Then, in the middle of a sentence, he said sharply, "I'll decide when the vacation is over." I stared at him. I don't know what he saw in my face, but his own softened perceptibly. Very quietly he said, "It doesn't mean what it meant when you were young.

The exchange will always deepen, even if the friendship does not.

I nearly weep. All I had ever wanted was that my mother be glad to be alive in my presence. I am still certain that if she had been, I'd have grown up whole inside. "Imagine," I say to Leonard. "She's so old and she can still do this to me." "It's not how old she is that's remarkable," he says. "It's how old you are.

No, what mattered here was that Alice had spent a lifetime struggling to become a conscious human being whose primary delight was the use of her own mind; and now she was locked up in an atmosphere constructed to ignore—nay, discard—that long, valiant effort, when the only thing owed a human being—yes, from first to last—was to have it honored.

As Anton Chekhov so memorably put it, 'Others made me a slave but I must squeeze the slave out of me drop by drop.

i could not but be moved -- by the great and the humble alike -- to pity and admiration for those who demonstrated repeatedly that to ' be and do' is not a given.

My mother was kind," she said. "She had a kind heart. Your mother? She was organized. My mother would sit up with her own kids when they were sick, and she'd sit up with you, too. Your mother would march into the kitchen like a top sergeant and say to my mother, 'Levinson, stop crying, put on a brassiere, fix yourself up.

It is fortification from the inside out that is wanted—the kind accomplished only by those prepared to do batter for a piece of emotional ground that must be taken again and again before it is actually secured.

In the late 1950s Leslie Fiedler observed that the Jewish-American novelist had internalized the stereotype of the Jew in American literature. When he sat down to write, he had trouble shaking off the hostile or sentimental images that appeared regularly in the work of gentile writers. It is impossible to overestimate the value of such an insight.

V S Naipaul] brings to [literary narrative] an extraordinary capacity for making art out of lucid thought. Observe hard, think even harder, figure out what you are thinking in the simplest, clearest language, and you will arrive at narrative: that is his credo.

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.