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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
Reverence
Habit
Respect
Stills
Still
Things
Doubtful
Alas

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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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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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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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick