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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Purpose
Dream
Life

More quotes by 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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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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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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The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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.
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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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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