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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
Real
Life
Sterile
Wishing
Begets
Divorced
Willing
Wish
Nothing

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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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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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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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.
Cynthia Ozick