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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
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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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
Cynthia Ozick
Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
Cynthia Ozick
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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.
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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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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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.
Cynthia Ozick