Cynthia Ozick Quotes: top 73 famous quotes about Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Cynthia Ozick quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance. — Cynthia Ozick

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better. — Cynthia Ozick

The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself. — Cynthia Ozick

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed. — Cynthia Ozick

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. — Cynthia Ozick

Lie, illusion, deception, she said
was that it truly, the universal language we all speak? — Cynthia Ozick

The ordinary is the divine. — Cynthia Ozick

We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. — Cynthia Ozick

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. — Cynthia Ozick

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that. — Cynthia Ozick

Very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys. — Cynthia Ozick

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap. — Cynthia Ozick

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. — Cynthia Ozick

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred. — Cynthia Ozick

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible. — Cynthia Ozick

Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined. — Cynthia Ozick

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever. — Cynthia Ozick

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination — Cynthia Ozick

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists. — Cynthia Ozick

You can never tell how genes ricochet. — Cynthia Ozick

I write in terror ... I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable. — Cynthia Ozick

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage. — Cynthia Ozick

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened. — Cynthia Ozick

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it. — Cynthia Ozick

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself. — Cynthia Ozick

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life. — Cynthia Ozick

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall. — Cynthia Ozick

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about. — Cynthia Ozick

Literature is for the sake of humanity. — Cynthia Ozick

Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm. — Cynthia Ozick

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts. — Cynthia Ozick

Time at length becomes justice. — Cynthia Ozick

The engineering is secondary to the vision. — Cynthia Ozick

I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel. — Cynthia Ozick

Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours. — Cynthia Ozick

I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since. — Cynthia Ozick

James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life. — Cynthia Ozick

Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. — Cynthia Ozick

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it ... — Cynthia Ozick

The novella will be called, I think, "The Messiah of Stockholm." It takes place in Stockholm. I'd better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out. — Cynthia Ozick

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions. — Cynthia Ozick

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self. — Cynthia Ozick

It is true that money attracts; but much money repels. — Cynthia Ozick

People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips — Cynthia Ozick

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. — Cynthia Ozick

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression. — Cynthia Ozick

I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer. — Cynthia Ozick

One reason writers write is out of revenge. — Cynthia Ozick

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. — Cynthia Ozick

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing. — Cynthia Ozick

To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne. — Cynthia Ozick

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to. — Cynthia Ozick

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery. — Cynthia Ozick

Death persecutes before it executes. — Cynthia Ozick

Literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it. — Cynthia Ozick

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom? — Cynthia Ozick

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew. — Cynthia Ozick

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life. — Cynthia Ozick

Time heals all things but one: Time. — Cynthia Ozick

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being. — Cynthia Ozick

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing. — Cynthia Ozick

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words. — Cynthia Ozick

Old saws have no teeth. — Cynthia Ozick

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. — Cynthia Ozick

I think most of my life I have not felt recognized. — Cynthia Ozick

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible. — Cynthia Ozick

I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters. — Cynthia Ozick

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes. — Cynthia Ozick

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter. — Cynthia Ozick

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick