Quote

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

Cynthia Ozick

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

Image
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
... woman is frequently praised as the more creative sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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
Image
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick