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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Never
Notices
Trouble
Happiness

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
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Old saws have no teeth.
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.
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To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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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
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
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... 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
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick