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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Speech
Works
Choose
Saying
Women
Yelling
Better
Cunning
Never
Obvious
Communication

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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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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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
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Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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I can't claim to be disenchanted with the current state of fiction because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.
Cynthia Ozick