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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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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Left
Especially
Smallest
Tremor
Anything
Influence
Favor
Placid
Soul
Dangerous
Scale
Objection
Ideas
Full
Scales
Symptom
Right
Taken
Favors
Respectability
Idea
Obvious
Objections
Speak
Sake
Pink
Black
Revolution
Symptoms

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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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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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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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