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

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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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.
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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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He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
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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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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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... 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.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
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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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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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