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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Entitled
Writer
Language
Seems
Power
Writing
Kind

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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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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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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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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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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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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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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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