Apegos feroces Quotes

“You’re growing old together,” she said to me. “You and what frightens you.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Fue en la cocina donde empecé a comprender el significado de la palabra "esposa”. Ahí estábamos, una pareja de 24 años: un día éramos una estudiante de doctorado y un artista, y al día siguiente éramos marido y mujer. Antes siempre habíamos puesto juntos sobre la mesa las rudimentarias comidas que tomábamos. Ahora, de pronto, Stefan estaba cada noche en su taller, dibujando o leyendo y yo estaba en la cocina, esforzándome por preparar y servir una comida que ambos pensábamos que debía ser adecuada. Recuerdo pasar me cobra y media preparando algún espantoso plato de cuchara sacado de una revista femenina para terminar engulléndolo los dos en 10 minutos, pasarme después una hora limpiando los cacharros y quedarme mirando el fregadero, pensando: "¿Será esto así durante los siguientes cuarenta años?”.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“We were all indulging ourselves. Nettie wanted to seduce, Mama wanted to suffer, I wanted to read. None of us knew how to discipline herself to the successful pursuit of an ideal, normal woman's life. And indeed, none of us ever achieved it.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“The imaginable had always been problematic. When I was a child the feel of things went into me: deep, narrow, intense. The grittiness of the street, the chalk-white air of the drugstore, the grain of the wooden floor in the storefront library, the blocks of cheese in the grocery-store refrigerator. I took it all so seriously, so literally. I was without imagination. I paid a kind of idiot attention to the look and feel of things, leveling an intent inner stare at the prototypic face of the world. These streets were all streets, these buildings all buildings, these women and men all women and men. I could imagine no other than that which stood before me. That child’s literalness of the emotions continued to exert influence, as though a shock had been administered to the nervous system and the flow of imagination had stopped. I could feel strongly, but I could not imagine. The granite gray of the street, the American-cheese yellow of the grocery store, the melancholy brownish tint of the buildings were all still in place, only now it was the woman on the couch, the girl hanging out the window, the confinement that sealed us off, on which I looked with that same inner intentness that had always crowded out possibility as well as uncertainty. It would be years before I learned that extraordinary focus, that excluding insistence, is also called depression.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“And I—the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image—I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

“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 best.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over the 'emptiness of a woman's life' as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analysed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley.

Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion?”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“It is only the present she hates; as soon as the
present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.
(On her mother)”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Una mujer sabe si ama a un hombre", decía. "Si no está segura, es que no lo ama”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“El mundo es un espacio acotado lleno de obsesiones. Recorro su extensión con aire lúgubre y ojos fijos, una mujer moderna condenada a saber que la experiencia del amor se volverá a reproducir repetidamente a una escala cada vez menor, pero siempre con un complemento íntegro de fiebre y náusea, intensidad y negación.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“We arrive at 69th Street, turn the corner, and walk toward the entrance to the Hunter auditorium. The doors are open. Inside, two or three hundred Jews sit listening to the testimonials that commemorate their unspeakable history. These testimonials are the glue that binds. They remind and persuade. They heal and connect. Let people make sense of themselves. ...

'Come inside,' she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. 'Come, you'll feel better.'

I shake my head no. 'Being Jewish can't help me anymore,' I tell her.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Min mors ønsker er simple, men de er ikke til forhandling. Hun oplever dem som nødvendigheder. Lige nu er hun nødt til at have en kop kaffe. Det vil ikke være muligt at komme uden om dette ønske, som hun kalder et behov, før hun holder kruset med den dampende varme væske i sin hånd og fører det op til munden.”
― Vivian Gornick, Voldsomme bånd

“Min mors sorg var primitiv og altomfattende: Den sugede ilten ud af luften. En tung, bedøvet fornemmelse fyldte mit hoved og min krop hver gang jeg kom hjem. Ingen af os – hverken min bror eller jeg selv, og da slet ikke min mor – fandt trøst i hinandens selskab. Vi var bare i eksil sammen, fanget i en fælles lidelse. For første gang var jeg bevidst om, at jeg blev grebet af åndelig ensomhed, og jeg kiggede ud på gaden, vendte mig mod de drømmende og melankolske indre anelser, der var blevet den eneste lindring fra det jeg hurtigt opfattede som en tilstand af tab og nederlag.”
― Vivian Gornick, Voldsomme bånd

“Pero no lo pilla. No sabe que estoy siendo irónica. Ni tampoco sabe que me ha dejado hecha polvo. No sabe que me tomo su angustia de manera personal, que me siento aniquilada por su depresión. ¿Cómo puede saberlo? Ni siquiera sabe que estoy delante de ella. Si le contase que para mí es como la muerte que ni siquiera sepa que estoy ahí, me miraría desde esos ojos en los que se agolpa una aflicción desconcertada, esta niña de setenta y siete años, y gritaría airada: –¡ No lo entiendes! ¡No lo has entendido nunca!”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Durante años me dije: "Por la mañana". Lo que, claro está, nunca ocurrió.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Viví en aquel bloque de pisos entre los seis y los veintiún años. En total había veinte apartamentos, cuatro por planta, y lo único que recuerdo es un edificio lleno de mujeres. Apenas recuerdo a ningún hombre. Estaban por todas partes, claro está –maridos, padres, hermanos–, pero sólo recuerdo a las mujeres. Y las recuerdo a todas tan toscas como la señora Drucker o tan feroces como mi madre. Nunca hablaban como si supiesen quiénes eran, como si comprendieran el trato que habían hecho con la vida, pero a menudo actuaban como si lo supiesen. Astutas, irascibles, iletradas, parecían sacadas de una novela de Dreiser. Había años de aparente calma y, de repente, cundían el pánico y la locura: dos o tres vidas marcadas (quizá arruinadas) y el tumulto se apagaba. De nuevo calma silenciosa, letargo erótico, la normalidad de la abnegación cotidiana. Y yo –la niña que crecía entre todas ellas, formándose a su imagen y semejanza– me empapaba de ellas como de cloroformo impregnado en un paño apretado contra mi cara. He tardado treinta años en entender cuánto entendí de ellas.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“-No lo sé. Lo único que sé es que es lista, que se merece una formación y que la va a tener. Éstos son los Estados Unidos. Las chicas no son vacas que pacen a la espera de que las crucen con un toro.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“The live, warm presence of my mother had disappeared. In its place stood this remoteness posing as Mama. Her anxiety was unbearable to me. It made me crazy. I needed her to respond, to be there with me. I needed it. Not getting what I needed, I fell into an anxiety of my own that rendered me nearly speechless.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

“She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

“If she would work he wouldn’t have to keep her in the house. She wouldn’t be crazy, and she could tell him to go to hell. Did you ever think about that, my brilliant daughter? That maybe she’s crazy because she can’t tell him to go to hell? When a woman can’t tell a man to go to hell, I have noticed, she is often crazy.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“When was the first I knew something about her in a world where men were sex, but women?—weren’t we just supposed to get out of the way when we saw it coming?”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“I drowsed in her etherising atmosphere”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

“Durante toda mi vida había sospechado que no era lo bastante interesante, ni lo bastante especial ni poseía el talento suficiente para mantener la atención de los que buscaban mi amistad o mi amor. Tenía la capacidad de atraer a la gente, eso es cierto, pero ¿también la de retenerla? Nunca estaba segura.”
― Vivian Gornick, Apegos feroces

“—Sigues eligiendo a tipos marginales como este, idealizándolos y luego no te entra en la cabeza que no sepan a lo que están. Te asombra que te hagan esto a ti. ¿No se dan cuenta de que deberías ser tú la que los dejara a ellos, no ellos a ti? Y luego actúas con superioridad.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers.
In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly.
That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.
Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.”
I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“Si mi madre no era capaz de identificar en otra mujer reacciones a un marido o un amante que duplicasen las suyas, no lo consideraba amor. Y el amor, decía, lo era todo. La vida de una mujer estaba determinada por el amor. Cualquier indicio que probase lo contrario —y las pruebas, de hecho, abundaban— era descartado e ignorado por sistema, tachado de su discurso y vetado por su intelecto.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“We cannot depend on change, but we can depend on surprise.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

“People have a right to their lives,' she says softly.”
― Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments