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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
Answers
Justice
Asks
Give
Liberal
Right
Diversity
Giving
University
Questions
Function

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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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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The ordinary is the divine.
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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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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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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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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.
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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 power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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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.
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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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