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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
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More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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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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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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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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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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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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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I can't claim to be disenchanted with the current state of fiction because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick