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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
Intimations
Resources
Imagination
Even

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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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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
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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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Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.
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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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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