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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Irretrievable
Impression
Remain
Two
Firsts
First
Things
Time

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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Death persecutes before it executes.
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The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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
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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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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.
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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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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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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
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
Cynthia Ozick
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Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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