Cynthia Ozick quotes

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. (Cynthia Ozick)
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
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. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
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. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. View quote
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. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
The engineering is secondary to the vision. (Cynthia Ozick)
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
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. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
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. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
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. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way. View quote
Cynthia Ozick
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. View quote
Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick

Occupation: American Novelist
Born: April 17, 1928
Quotes count: 19

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