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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

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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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.
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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.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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 the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
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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.
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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.
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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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.
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We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
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There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick