Cynthia Ozick Quotes
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A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?
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It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.
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Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.
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Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.
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We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?
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An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.
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In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
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He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
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Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.
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Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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The ordinary is the divine.
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a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.
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To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
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It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.
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Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.
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To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders talent praises death.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.
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Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.
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What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.
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Advances in technology neither impede nor augment literature.
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Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.
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