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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Culture
Summary
Instrument
Instruments
Literature

More quotes by 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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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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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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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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