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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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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
America
Suburb
Wells
Vanished
Well
Suburbs
Exactly
Works
Middle
Condo
Alive
Migrated
Class
Bohemia

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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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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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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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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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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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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.
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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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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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