Gornick

“You have to learn to write from the very center, and to have the courage to look at that center.”
Vivian Gornick

“If you don't leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”
― Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

“I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently...”
― Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir