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

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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
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
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick