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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
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Else
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More quotes by Cynthia Ozick
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
... 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
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
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
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.
Cynthia Ozick
What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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
Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
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
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
Cynthia Ozick
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
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
