Cynthia Ozick - Art and Ardor (1983)

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

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
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
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
Literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.

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

Cynthia Ozick
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.

Cynthia Ozick
If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain.

Cynthia Ozick