"My friendship with Leonard began with me invoking the laws of love: the ones that involved the expectancy. "We are one," I decided shortly after we met. "You are me, and I am you, and it is our obliga..."
- Vivian Gornick
"Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom."
"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..."
"As I saw myself moving ever farther toward the social margin, nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to..."
"In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that ..."
"She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?"
"Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it. They mimic the recalled gestures and mannerisms of the women they’ve been trained to become and hope for the be..."