For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.
Vivian GornickWhat 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 GornickPsychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.
Vivian GornickNo man worth his salt does not wish to be a husband and father; yet no man is raised to be a husband and father and no man would ever conceive of those relationships as instruments of his prime function in life. Yet every woman is raised, still, to believe that the fulfillment of these relationships is her prime function in life and, what's more, her instinctive choice.
Vivian Gornick