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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Last
Usefulness
Demonstrate
Carried
Famous
Madness
Logic
Flagrantly
Society
Scrap
Lasts
Madmen

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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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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 real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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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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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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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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The ordinary is the divine.
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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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Old saws have no teeth.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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.
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.
Cynthia Ozick