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The ordinary is the divine.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Ordinary
Divine

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
Cynthia Ozick
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick
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Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
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One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts certain ideas and experiences hurt one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
Cynthia Ozick
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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 imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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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.
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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I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
Cynthia Ozick
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick