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

Cynthia Ozick Quotes

The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.

— Cynthia Ozick

Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.

— Cynthia Ozick

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.

— Cynthia Ozick

Time at length becomes justice.

— Cynthia Ozick

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

— Cynthia Ozick

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

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

People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.

— Cynthia Ozick

I write in terror... I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.

— 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

If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

— Cynthia Ozick

The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren’t the lords of the earth.

— Cynthia Ozick

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

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

You can never tell how genes ricochet.

— Cynthia Ozick

Brilliant students make good aides.

— Cynthia Ozick

Get thee to the novel! – the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart’s maelstrom.

— Cynthia Ozick

Death’s reliable.

— Cynthia Ozick

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

Because she fears the past she distrusts the future – it, too, will turn into the past.

— Cynthia Ozick
More Cynthia Ozick Quote >>
Privacy Policy   6.90ms  0.71MB