What Marxists share with capitalists is a profound belief that we are all defined, utterly and entirely, by our functional circumstances in The Syste… - Vivian Gornick

It came from a piece in which I said that a time will come when men and women will approach each other at eye level – an idea, and a phrase, to which I was devoted.

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.

all the liberationist movements have taken these classes of people, blacks, women, gays, and instructed them now in these years that not only is it your right to act like a whole human being, but it's your obligation. So I’ve watched, for much longer than you, how women have entered all of these professions that they never dreamed they could enter. And it's a thrill to watch people, especially the young, who take their place in the world without any perturbation, without being perturbed in any way about their right, much less their obligation, to occupy a space. And I feel it's our struggle that gave them this. If it wasn’t for what we went through, women forty years younger than me would never have... they go into it without thinking twice, as if there's no question. And it's always like that. Nobody lives historically, everybody lives in the intense present. So whatever we have supplied for their present is [received with] “hasn't it always been like this? Is there any other way to do it?” But it has to do with that assumption that a wholeness of being gives you the right and the obligation to make the largest sense of what you are about in the world no matter what you are.