Cynthia Ozick - Life Quotes

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

Cynthia Ozick
In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.

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