Quotes from Vivian Gornick

All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine.

She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?

This book is for Randall Jarrell, the man who believed we are devoted to the act of making literature because it leads to the act of reading.

This is the intimacy that will bind us all our lives, holding us forever to the task implicit in all love relations: how to connect yet not merge, how to respond yet not be absorbed, how to detach but not withdraw.

As yet, there was nothing for it but to endure. We became fond of responding to irony in novels of love as one would to a finger pressed against the flesh near an open sore.

The life we lead as writers is awful—it's boring, tedious, lonely," -Vivian Gornick

Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous in gathering of city dwellers. This swarm of human hives, also hanging anchored in space, is the New York design offering generic connection. The pleasure it gives soothes beyond all explanation.

Come quasi tutti i lettori, a volte ho la sensazione di essere nata leggendo".

Si mi madre no era capaz de identificar en otra mujer reacciones a un marido o un amante que duplicasen las suyas, no lo consideraba amor. Y el amor, decía, lo era todo. La vida de una mujer estaba determinada por el amor. Cualquier indicio que probase lo contrario —y las pruebas, de hecho, abundaban— era descartado e ignorado por sistema, tachado de su discurso y vetado por su intelecto.

The essay becomes an exercise in the meaning and value of watching a writer conquer their own sense of threat to deliver themself of their wisdom.

Letter writing is not the noble enterprise. Remaining fully expressive is the noble enterprise.

Lo amaba, de verdad lo amaba. Pero sólo hasta cierto punto. Más allá de ese punto, había algo opaco en mí que no cedía. Podía ver la opacidad. Podía palparla y saborearla.

Sus deseos son simples, pero innegociables. Los experimenta como necesidades.

Those of us who crave the expressive but can't shake off the melancholy walk the street.

For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.