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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
Life
Sterile
Wishing
Begets
Divorced
Willing
Wish
Nothing
Real

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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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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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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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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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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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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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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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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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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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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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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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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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I can't claim to be disenchanted with the current state of fiction because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.
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