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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
Feeling
Word
Feelings
Doesn
Immersion
Else
Obsession
Everything
Total
Matter
Passionate
Passion

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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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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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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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 imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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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.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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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.
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I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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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 real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
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Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
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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