Cynthia Ozick Quotes

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

When something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.

a. Critics: people who make monuments out of books. b. Biographers: people who make books out of monuments. c. Poets: people who raze monuments. d. Publishers: people who sell rubble. e. Readers: people who buy it.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

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.

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.

I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.

A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?

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.

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.

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.

What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.

... 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.

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

Time at length becomes justice.

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.

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.

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

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.

Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer seduced by the uncanny and the unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, he once again reaches into a magical cornucopia of folklore and fantasy and spreads before us, in enchanting language, the marvels and shocks of dybbuks, ghosts, demons, spirits, and wizards.

The ordinary is the divine.

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

It isn't the instrument that influences High-Minded or Low-Minded; it's the quality of Mind itself.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.