Vivian Gornick said this quote

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

Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom.

~ Vivian Gornick

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 remain human - the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques - was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. That refusal became company. I was never less alone than alone in the crowded street. Here, I found, I could imagine myself. Here, I thought, I am buying time. What a notion: buying time.

~ Vivian Gornick

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 idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.

~ Vivian Gornick