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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Forms
Possible
Religion
Else
Form
Someone
Tion
Work
World
Dedication
More quotes by Cynthia Ozick
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
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.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
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
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
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
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
