Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
“Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?” — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
The Hebrew Bible has long been the world's possession, and those who come to it by any means, through whatever language, are… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
“The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh . The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk . Leave it to the Germans… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
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,… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
There was a period... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
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… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share ofthe Jewish… — Cynthia Ozick Copy Share
