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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
Communication
Speech
Works
Choose
Saying
Women
Yelling
Better
Cunning
Never
Obvious

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.
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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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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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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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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.
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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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Old saws have no teeth.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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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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 imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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.
Cynthia Ozick
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick