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To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Even
Acutely
Throne
Thrones
Powerless
Listening
Listen

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
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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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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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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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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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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
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Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick