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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
Misrepresentation
Invention
Sunk
Memory
Observations
Illusion
Distortion
Writers
Imaginative
Fakery
Large
Crew
Insinuation
Habit
Habits
Shifty
Wind
Imposture
Memories
Observation

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
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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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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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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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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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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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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 has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
Cynthia Ozick