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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
Divorced
Willing
Wish
Nothing
Real
Life
Sterile
Wishing
Begets

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The ordinary is the divine.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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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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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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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 power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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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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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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Awe consumes any brand that ignites 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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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 trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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