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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
Civilization
Produce
Belief
Godlessness
Vulgarity
Invariably
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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
The ordinary is the divine.
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
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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
Time at length becomes justice.
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
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
