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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
World
Dedication
Forms
Possible
Religion
Else
Form
Someone
Work
Tion

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
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What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share ofthe Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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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
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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
Cynthia Ozick