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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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Death persecutes before it executes.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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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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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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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The ordinary is the divine.
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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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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick