Cynthia Ozick Quotes

We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.

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

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

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.

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.

The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.

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.

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?

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.

James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life.

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

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

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

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

The most celebrated American author of the twentieth century, Bellow objected during the first part of his career to being designated a “Jewish writer, ” but it was he who demonstrated how a Jewish voice could speak for an integrated America. With Bellow, Jewishness moved in from the immigrant margins to become a new form of American regionalism. Yet he did not have to write about Jews in order to write as a Jew. Bellow's curious mingling of laughter and trembling is particularly manifest in his novel Henderson the Rain King, that follows an archetypal Protestant American into mythic Africa. Bellow not only influenced and paved the way for other American Jewish writers like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick, but naturalized the immigrant voice: the American novel came to seem freshly authentic when it spoke in the voice of one of its discernible minorities.

...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.

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.

You can never tell how genes ricochet.

Death's reliable.

She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.

¿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?

Brilliant students make good aides.

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.

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.

Never take things for granted. Cynthia Ozick once said that “we often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.” This could not be truer! Most humans have amnesia when it comes to appreciating things and people that have rewarded them for a long time. When something works perfectly, don’t forget how hard it was to set it up originally. Similarly, don’t be unruly or unappreciative of someone who has showered you with his or her love and affection for a long time. Sometimes, saying thank you can do wonders in someone’s day, week…or life.

A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of the free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of lenguage and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.

1919, race riots broke out in Chicago and a dock workers’ strike hit New York; the eight-hour workday was instituted nationally; President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize and presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations in Paris; the Red Army took Omsk, Kharkov, and the Crimea; Mussolini founded the Italian fascist movement; Paderewski became Premier of Poland. Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres. Short-wave radio made its earliest appearance, there was progress in sound for movies, and Einstein’s theory of relativity was borne out by astrophysical experiments. Walter

An author's extraliterary utterance (blunt information), prenovel or postnovel, may infiltrate journalism; it cannot touch the novel itself. 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. The art of the novel (worn yet opulent phrase) is in the mix of idiosyncratic language - language imprinted in the writer, like the whorl of a fingertip - and an unduplicable design inscribed on the mind by character and image. Invention has little capacity for the true-to-life snapshot. It is true to its own stirrings.

On a gray afternoon I sit in a silent room and contemplate din. In the street a single car passes - a rapid bass vowel - and then it is quiet again. So what is this uproar, this hubbub, this heaving rumble of zigzag static I keep hearing? This echo chamber spooling out spirals of chaos? An unmistakable noise as clearly mine as fingerprint or twist of DNA: the thrum of regret, of memory, of defeat, of mutability, of bitter fear, made up of shame and ambition and anger and vanity and wishing. The soundtrack of a movie of the future, an anticipatory ribbon of scenes long dreaded, of daydreams without a prayer of materializing. Or else: the replay of unforgotten conversations, humiliating, awkward, indelible. Mainly it is the buzz of the inescapably mundane, the little daily voice that insists and insists: right now, not now, too late, too soon, why not, better not, turn it on, turn it off, notice this, notice that, be sure to take care of, remember not to. The nonstop chatter that gossips, worries, envies, invokes, yearns, condemns, self-condemns.

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. —Cynthia Ozick

If introspection is thought, Marvin was not introspective. He felt the contempt he lived under as raw sensation, as heat--heat in the ears, behind the eyes, in the tangled ganglia sheathed by the skull. And contempt, it seemed, was no different from fear. At Princeton he became afraid. It dawned on him that it was not enough to be bright (all Townsend Harris boys were bright): you had to be right. For the first time he was struck by the import of birthright--you slid out of the womb grasping it in your tiny fist, a certificate that guaranteed you would know how to speak and dress and scorn and brazenly intimidate everyone doomed to enter the world empty-handed. Not that Marvin was altogether empty-handed--he had his scholarship, and he had, most of all, the engine of his will and the grim burden of his hurt. He resisted humiliation by accepting it, sometimes almost appearing to invite it: it taught him what was suitable and what wasn't.

That mass killings and genocides recur on earth does not mean that they are similar. Each instance of human, moral evil, and each victim’s personal death, possesses its unique history and form. To generalize, as Cynthia Ozick points out, is to “befog” evil’s specificity. Any blurring is dangerous, if inevitable, because the deaths of a few hundred scholars or ten thousand people or one million or thirty million people pain little at diminishing removes of time and place.

Not everything given away is recoverable.

superb group of mind-mindful novelists at work today: Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—to start.

Like twinned with unlike is beauty's shock.

You knew beforehand that when you opened the magazine you would find the nasty anger of the pure-hearted.

There stands the parable; there stands the sacred metaphor of belonging, one heart to another. WIthout the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart.

Eventually I understood that a man in possession of Bildung was more than merely cultivated: he was ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom.

What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. —CYNTHIA OZICK, AMERICAN WRITER, B. 1928

He’s a kid from L.A., they drink sunshine and milk.

I haven’t got the goddamnedest idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Kierkeguard, what’s that? Sounds like deodorant, which is to say that the whole thing smells as far as I’m concerned.

Nothing in the world can be sustained, neither bugles nor hope nor woe nor desire nor common well-being nor horns, and even redemption, that suspect covenant, can be revised by the bitter and loveless Christ to whom nothing, not even life, is irretrievable.

…if I had assumed a beach it was because of that other shipwreck in my brain,[/] where early early[/] and from the start[/] I had figmented a sandbar the color of gold,[/] and a yellow shoal glowering with mist,[/] and rocking there a figure tugged[/] and secreted like a sculpture by tide,[/] or like the raised effigy on a coin of some overrun civilization,[/] the lineaments of its caesar’s profile swathed in undersea moss,[/] the eye of a rubbed freckle,[/] the noble nose worn to a snub,[/] conquest sea-dyed pale dead tan.[/] My father’s body lay in my brain,[/] and in the same sea-vessel[/] yet elsewhere on still another beach[/] the body of my governess spread itself flat on a flat rock,[/] sporting motionless;[/] and here is the lizard of my father’s tread, crouching;[/] and Palestine burning;[/] while beyond, in the water, as they join,[/] a book opens wings without lungs and drowns.

But what was wanted—what was wanted for Mrs. Mitwisser—was simply Story: a story about men and women free of history, except their own.

Two things remain irretrievable: time and first impressions. - Cynthia Ozick

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

I think incessantly of death, of oblivion, how nothing lasts, not even memory when the one who remembers is gone.

The oasis is always over the next hill. And the next hill is always more of the same desert.

Certainly I favor tradition; I am aware that ancestral decorum ought not to be scorned. The aberrant is to be shunned. Life’s fundamental rhythms depend on sameness, not deviation. All this I long ago learned from my mother.

I fear the dark. The dark is where preexistence abides. It is not possible to think of pre-existence, but one dreads its facsimile: post-existence. Do not erase, obliterate, or annihilate me. Mother, my mother. I will serve you. Use me in the wide world.

instead he was being led away from his proper Emma by a woman who was conducting a revolution in his kitchen.

Not everything given away is recoverable!

You think the world is made of literature. You think reality is a piece of paper

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.