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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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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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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 ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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 real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
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Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.
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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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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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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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
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He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
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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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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick