Cynthia Ozick Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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.

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life.

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
Very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.

Cynthia Ozick
It is useless either to hate or to love truth — but it should be noticed.

Cynthia Ozick
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.

Cynthia Ozick
Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.

Cynthia Ozick
It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.

Cynthia Ozick
Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctification. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
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
All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.

Cynthia Ozick
To desire to be what one can be is purpose in life. There are no exterior forces. There are only interior forces. Who squanders talent praises death.

Cynthia Ozick
What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.

Cynthia Ozick
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?

Cynthia Ozick
I was taking a course with Lionel Trilling and wrote a paper for him with an opening sentence that contained a parenthesis. He returned the paper with a wounding reprimand: 'Never, never begin an essay with a parenthesis in the first sentence.' Ever since then, I've made a point of starting out with a parenthesis in the first sentence.

Cynthia Ozick
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self; a writer's lessons are ineluctably internal.

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

Cynthia Ozick
The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.

Cynthia Ozick
A writer is someone born with a gift. An athlete can run. A painter can paint. A writer has a facility with words. A good writer can also think.

Cynthia Ozick
History... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
The usefulness of madmen is famous: They demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

Cynthia Ozick
What is hysteria if not fates' tears, too deep for thought?

Cynthia Ozick
Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

Cynthia Ozick
The glimmering world is the past. And everybody inherits a past. And it glimmers either happily or miserably.

Cynthia Ozick