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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
Wish
Nothing
Real
Life
Sterile
Wishing
Begets
Divorced
Willing

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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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
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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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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick