Glittering Gifts

Zuccotti Park

"Almost anything might happen to you in New York . . . the fabulous city like a great Christmas tree, so brilliantly lighted, with so many glittering gifts perpetually being handed out."
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Araby

"I have always lived in New York, but a good part of my life I longed for the city the way someone in a small town would, yearning to arrive at the capital. Growing up in the Bronx was like growing up in a village. From earliest adolescence I knew there was a center-of-the-world, and that I was far from it. At the same time, I also knew it was only a subway ride away, downtown in Manhattan. Manhattan was Araby."
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Sheer World

Manhattan (Bill Abbott / Wikimedia Commons)

"The way I saw it, the West Side was one long rectangle of apartment houses filled with artists and intellectuals; this richness, mirrored on the East Side by money and social standing, made the city glamorous, and painfully exciting. I could taste in my mouth world, sheer world. All I had to do was get old enough and New York would be mine."

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Human Expresiveness

"Most people are in New York because they need evidence—in large quantities—of human expressiveness; and they need it not now and then, but every day. That is what they need. Those who go off to the manageable cities can do without; those who come to New York cannot."
Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City

Social Fluidity

Morningside Heights

"There isn't a neighborhood in New York that is free of the poor, the raffish, the unwanted. Social fluidity in the city means no one gets away from no one."
Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level

New York Friendship

"New York friendship is an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive."
Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level

Town and Country

Gantry Plaza State Park

"New York is like a country, the neighborhood is your town, you spot someone from the block or the building in another neighborhood and the first impulse to the brain is, What are you doing here?"
Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level

After the Rain

Bernard Baruch Way

"It rained earlier in the day and now, at one in the afternoon, for a minute and a half, New York is washed clean. The streets glitter in the pale spring sunlight. Cars radiate dust-free happiness. Storefront windows sparkle mindlessly. Even people look made anew."

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments