Best Cynthia Ozick Quotes
- 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,… Awesomely
- 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… Aspiration
- Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief… Available
- 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… Attar
- The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap. Carried
- One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay… Bad
- 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. All
- What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. Childhood
- If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage. Act
- We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. Appreciation
- 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… Book
- After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. Age
- The engineering is secondary to the vision. Engineering
- I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born… Article
- Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! Any
- All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being. All
- I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to… Awaits
- Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. America
- 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
- 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
- Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. Auden
- 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… Atrocities
- Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering… Behind
- Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice… Admire
- When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been… All