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The End of The Novel of Love QUOTES

The End of The Novel of Love QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " As yet, there was nothing for it but to endure. We became fond of responding to irony in novels of love as one would to a finger pressed against the flesh near an open sore. "

― Vivian Gornick , The End of The Novel of Love

3 " We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. Under its influence we gave up neither our fears nor our angers. Within ourselves we remained unchanged. The development was an astonishment: not at all what had been expected. The atmosphere became charged with revelation, and it altered us permanently as a culture. "

― Vivian Gornick , The End of The Novel of Love

4 " Put romantic love at the center of a novel today, and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are, or how the time in which we live got to be as it is. No one, it seems to me. Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery. "

― Vivian Gornick , The End of The Novel of Love