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.Collection: Gratitude
What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.Collection: Children
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.Collection: Dream
Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.Collection: Death
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.Collection: Giving
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imaginationCollection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Mistake
The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.Collection: Writing
If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.Collection: Writing
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Travel
Time heals all things but one: Time.Collection: Time
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.Collection: Happiness
It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.Collection: Truth
Death persecutes before it executes.Collection: Death
The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.Collection: Beautiful
The ordinary is the divine.Collection: Ordinary
Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.Collection: Disease
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?Collection: Cousin
Time at length becomes justice.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Ambition
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.Collection: Thinking
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.Collection: Keys
Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.Collection: Kings
The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.Collection: Discovery
The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.Collection: Art
Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.Collection: Sea
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.Collection: Book
Imagine an American Hans Christian Andersen, conceive of the Brothers Grimm living in Missouri, and you will approximate Howard Schwartz, a fable-maker and fable-gatherer seduced by the uncanny and the unearthly. In Lilith's Cave, he once again reaches into a magical cornucopia of folklore and fantasy and spreads before us, in enchanting language, the marvels and shocks of dybbuks, ghosts, demons, spirits, and wizards.Collection: Christian
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.Collection: Distance
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.Collection: Habit
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.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Sex
All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.Collection: Book
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.Collection: Hurt
We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.Collection: Taken
literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.Collection: Culture
What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past--the whole life of a civilization--but also a major share ofthe Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.Collection: Past
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.Collection: Lasts
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Taken
Of comic novels that have quaffed the elixir of 'classic': Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm.Collection: Max
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Writing
He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.Collection: Doe
Paradise is only for those who have already been there.Collection: Native American
Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom?Collection: Freedom
Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.Collection: Dedication
I measure my life in sentences pressed out, line by line, like the lustrous ooze on the underside of the snail, the snail's secret open seam, its wound, leaking attar.Collection: Writing