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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
Demonstrate
Carried
Famous
Madness
Logic
Flagrantly
Society
Scrap
Lasts
Madmen
Last
Usefulness

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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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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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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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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The ordinary is the divine.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick