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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Apprenticeship
Ultimately
Self
Real
Always

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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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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.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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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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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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Cynthia Ozick
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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
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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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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
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick