"One's own best self. For centuries, this was the key concept behind any essential definition of friendship: that one's friend is a virtuous being who speaks to the virtue in oneself. How foreign such a concept to the children of the therapeutic culture! Today we do not look to see, much less affirm, our best selves in one another. To the contrary, it is the openness with which we admit to our emotional incapacities - the fear, the anger, the humiliation - that excites contemporary bonds of friendship. Nothing draws us closer to one another than the degree to which we face our deepest shame openly in one another's company... What we want is to feel known, warts and all: the more warts the better. It is the great illusion of our culture that what we confess to is who we are."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Essayists from the United StatesMemoirists from the United StatesWomen authors from the United StatesFeminists from the United StatesWomen born in the 1930s
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vivian_Gornick
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Vivian Gornick
41 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Vivian Gornick →
Related Quotes
"Knowledge brings pain and anxiety, exhilaration and an undreamt-of courage."
"inner freedom inevitably releases one into the larger world."
"This is the intimacy that will bind us all our lives, holding us forever to the task implicit in all love relations: …"
"If you don't leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen."
"Collectively speaking, if we chart the internal mood of every successful movement for social integration we find that…"
"Responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader--no less than between people--is th…"
"Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping grou…"
"...to have anything full strength (especially something which outlives itself) is to insure increasing isolation; and…"
"At the very center of all human life is energy, psychic energy. It is the force of that energy that drives us, that m…"
"A lot of it was just sheer grinding shitwork. You think making a revolution is all agony and ecstasy? It's not, it's …"