Cynthia Ozick

One reason writers write is out of revenge.

— Cynthia Ozick

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.

— Cynthia Ozick

Old saws have no teeth.

— Cynthia Ozick

The ordinary is the divine.

— Cynthia Ozick

Death persecutes before it executes.

— Cynthia Ozick

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

— Cynthia Ozick

Time heals all things but one: Time.

— Cynthia Ozick

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.

— Cynthia Ozick

Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Cynthia Ozick

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are…

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey

— Cynthia Ozick

“Eventually I understood that a man in possession of Bildung was more than merely cultivated: he was ideally purified by humanism, an…

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of…

— Cynthia Ozick

My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology,…

— Cynthia Ozick

“...this is very nice, cozy. You got a nice cozy place, Lublin." "Cramped," Rosa said. "I work from a different theory. For…

— Cynthia Ozick

A novel can be set in motion by an incident, a character, a location, a mood - by anything at all. Sometimes…

— Cynthia Ozick

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor…

— Cynthia Ozick

I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result…

— Cynthia Ozick

I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is…

— Cynthia Ozick

“The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh . The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk . Leave it to…

— Cynthia Ozick

What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has…

— Cynthia Ozick

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the…

— Cynthia Ozick

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

“Consider also the special word they used: survivor . Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being .…

— Cynthia Ozick

It's true that the young who now flock to script writing, or producing and directing, to fulfill the demands of these new…

— Cynthia Ozick

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

— Cynthia Ozick

Time at length becomes justice.

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick