Quote

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

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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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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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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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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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.
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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 engineering is secondary to the vision.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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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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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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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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 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