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Cynthia Ozick
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“It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.”
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“History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.”
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“What is hysteria if not fates' tears, too deep for thought?”
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“Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.”
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“The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.”
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“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.”
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“Time heals all things but one: Time.”
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“Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.”
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“He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.”
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“It is useless either to hate or to love truth — but it should be noticed.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.”
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“Death persecutes before it executes.”
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“Old saws have no teeth.”
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“Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.”
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“All pity is self-pity.”
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“It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.”
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“We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.”
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“We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake — especially an obvious idea — has no respectability.”
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“Paradise is only for those who have already been there.”
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“The engineering is secondary to the vision.”
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“In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.”
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“Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“Time at length becomes justice.”
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“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.”
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“... literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.”
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“The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.”
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“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.”
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“All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.”
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“To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.”
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“If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”
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“Traveling is seeing; it is the implicity that we travel by.”
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“To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.”
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“... he started on the first page and finished on the last. He was not a skimmer or a sniffer; he read meticulously, as if, swimming, he were being filmed in slow motion.”
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“Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.”
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“Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.”
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“Awe consumes any brand that ignites it ...”
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“After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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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.”
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“What we remember from childhood we remember forever — permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen.”
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“Finally one tires / of so many spires.”
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“Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it — so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.”
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“... real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self; a writer's lessons are ineluctably internal.”
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“In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.”
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“... very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.”
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“There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.”
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“The ordinary is the divine.”
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“In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.”
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“Everybody inherits a past. And it glimmers either happily or miserably.”
Cynthia Ozick, U.S. writer
(1928)