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Cynthia Ozick Quotes

born 1928 United States

Cynthia Ozick (born April 17, 1928) is a Jewish American short story writer, novelist, and essayist.

United States
Authors
Essayists
Novelists
Short story writers

Random Cynthia Ozick quote

16 quotes

Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart.

Metaphor & Memory (1991)

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

Trust (1966)

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

Fame & folly (1996)

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

Foreign Bodies (2010)

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

Dictation: A Quartet (2008)

He who cries, "What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me," does not know even that.

Trust (1966)

Like twinned with unlike is beauty's shock. And beauty...is eternal.

Dictation: A Quartet (2008)

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

The Shawl (1989)

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution. ("Justice to Feminism")

Art & Ardor (1983)

Sometimes repugnance overrides psychological curiosity, and sometimes psychological curiosity is no more illuminating than pornography.

Interview with The New York Times (2016)

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded.

Interview with The Paris Review (1987)

It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!

Interview with The Paris Review (1987)

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language.

Interview with The Paris Review (1987)

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. ("Justice to Feminism")

Art & Ardor (1983)

The insight that the largest, deepest, widest imaginative faculty of all is what you need to be a monotheist teaches me that you simply cannot be a Jew if you repudiate the imagination.

Interview with The Paris Review (1987)

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. (Forward)

Art & Ardor (1983)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Cynthia Ozick (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.