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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Nothing
Real
Life
Sterile
Wishing
Begets
Divorced
Willing
Wish

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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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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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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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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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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.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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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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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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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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