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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.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Writers
Distortion
Large
Imaginative
Fakery
Habit
Crew
Insinuation
Wind
Habits
Shifty
Memories
Observation
Imposture
Invention
Misrepresentation
Memory
Sunk
Illusion
Observations

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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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 engineering is secondary to the vision.
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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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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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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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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.
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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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Time at length becomes justice.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick
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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