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There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule.

— Vivian Gornick The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)

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More quotes by Vivian Gornick

Knowledge brings pain and anxiety, exhilaration and an undreamt-of courage.

If you don't leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001)

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

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir (2015)

inner freedom inevitably releases one into the larger world.

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.

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader (2020)

All Vivian Gornick quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Vivian Gornick (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.