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

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Gratitude
Deserve
Teacher
Appreciative
Education
Thanksgiving
Often
Thankful
Take
Appreciation
Things
Thanks
Granted

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
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No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
Cynthia Ozick
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
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Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
Cynthia Ozick
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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 future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.
Cynthia Ozick
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The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
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Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.
Cynthia Ozick
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
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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 ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
Cynthia Ozick
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
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I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Cynthia Ozick
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick