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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

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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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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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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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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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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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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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.
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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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... 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.
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