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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Resources
Imagination
Even
Intimations
More quotes by Cynthia Ozick
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
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
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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
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
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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
... woman is frequently praised as the more creative sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.
Cynthia Ozick
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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
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
Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick