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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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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Matter
Passionate
Passion
Feeling
Word
Feelings
Doesn
Immersion
Else
Obsession
Everything
Total

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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Old saws have no teeth.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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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.
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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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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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.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
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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
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites 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