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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
Works
Middle
Condo
Alive
Migrated
Class
Bohemia
America
Suburb
Wells
Vanished
Well
Suburbs
Exactly

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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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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.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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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Time at length becomes justice.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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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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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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