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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

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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 imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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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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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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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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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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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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