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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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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Things
Doubtful
Alas
Reverence
Habit
Respect
Stills
Still

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.
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Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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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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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
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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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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.
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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.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
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.
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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 trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick