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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
Respect
Stills
Still
Things
Doubtful
Alas
Reverence
Habit
More quotes by Cynthia Ozick
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
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
Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
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.
Cynthia Ozick
The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
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
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
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
... 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
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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