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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Product
Products
Civilization
Produce
Belief
Godlessness
Vulgarity
Invariably
Produces

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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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.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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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 imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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The ordinary is the divine.
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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.
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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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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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
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Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.
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