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

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Giving
University
Questions
Function
Answers
Justice
Asks
Give
Liberal
Right
Diversity

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
Cynthia Ozick
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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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Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
Cynthia Ozick
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
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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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick