Quote

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

Cynthia Ozick

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick