Cynthia Ozick > Quotes

“We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”
― Cynthia Ozick

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

“To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination”
― 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

“No, no, sometimes a person feels to be alone."
"If you're alone too much," Persky said, "you think too much."
"Without a life," Rosa answered, "a person lives where they can. If all they got is thoughts, that's where they live."
"You ain't got a life?"
"Thieves took it.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

“It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sunball with empty ribcages.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

“I read in desperate snatches in the interstices of the Quotidian, and dream of finding three uninterrupted quiet hours to think, moon, mentally maunder, and, above all, write. I am pursued by an anti-Muse; her name is Life. Her homely multisyllabic surname is often left unenunciated, but to certain initiates it may be whispered: Exigency.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“Consider also the special word they used: survivor. Something new. As long as they didn't have to say human being. It used to be refugee, but by now there was no such creature, no more refugees, only survivors. A name like a number -- counted apart from the ordinary swarm. Blue digits on the arm, what difference? They don't call you a woman anyhow. Survivor. Even when your bones get melted into the grains of the earth, still they'll forget human being. Survivor and survivor and survivor; always and always. Who made up these words, parasites on the throat of suffering!”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

“I write in terror...I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One's own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Din In The Head: Spirited Essays on Great Literature, Wit, and the Curative Power of Imagination

“Cultivation, old civilization, beauty, history! Surprising turnings of streets, shapes of venerable cottages, lovely aged eaves, unexpected and gossamer turrets, steeples, the gloss, the antiquity! Gardens. Whoever speaks of Paris has never seen Warsaw. [...] Whoever yearns for an aristocratic sensibility, let him switch on the great light of Warsaw.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips”
― Cynthia Ozick

“James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life. ”
― Cynthia Ozick, Trust

“If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Heir To The Glimmering World: A Grand Romantic Tale of Exiles, Desire, and Reversals of Fortune in 193s New York

“I work from a different theory. For everything there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you get along better.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

“...this is very nice, cozy. You got a nice cozy place, Lublin."

"Cramped," Rosa said.

"I work from a different theory. For everything, there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the good way, you go along better."

"I don't like to give myself lies," Rosa said.

"Life is short, we all got to lie.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

“Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl

“Death's reliable.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm

“The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm

“Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?”
― Cynthia Ozick, Dictation: A Quartet

“By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock.”
― Cynthia Ozick

“The oasis is always over the next hill. And the next hill is always more of the same desert.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Antiquities

“The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh. The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk. Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like some endless elastic belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe.”
― Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm

“¿Así que es a eso que se encamina la nueva generación de lectores: hacia esa perdición que es el egotismo y las pretensiones de superiodad moralizadora y politizada?”
― Cynthia Ozick, Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays

“She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies

“You can never tell how genes ricochet.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies