Cynthia Ozick Quotes

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

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

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

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.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

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

Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.

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

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.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

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

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

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.

Time at length becomes justice.

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

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.

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

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

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

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

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

The ordinary is the divine.

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

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

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.

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

It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

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?

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

I can't claim to be disenchanted "with the current state of fiction" because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.