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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.

— Vivian Gornick The End of The Novel of Love (1997)

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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.