Cynthia Ozick Quotes & Sayings

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

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

To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the world, saying no and no again as they parade by in all their allure. And to be a writer is to plunge into the parade and become one of the delirious marchers. — Cynthia Ozick

I think most of my life I have not felt recognized. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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! — Cynthia Ozick

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives. — Cynthia Ozick

I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel. — Cynthia Ozick

Wars, invented and organized by the highest available consciousnesses (do the worms go to war? do the fish? do the paramecia?), are the planet's chief source and cause of torment. — Cynthia Ozick

If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside. — Cynthia Ozick

Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb. — Cynthia Ozick

An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth. — Cynthia Ozick

It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions. — 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. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

An essay is a thing of the imagination. If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion, one need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay rarely has an educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play. — Cynthia Ozick

I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th. — Cynthia Ozick

The engineering is secondary to the vision. — Cynthia Ozick

Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.' — Cynthia Ozick

Why do men carry guns and build prison camps, when the nurturing earth is made for freedom? — Cynthia Ozick

After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through. — Cynthia Ozick

Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter. — Cynthia Ozick

One reason writers write is out of revenge. — Cynthia Ozick

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined. — Cynthia Ozick

We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. — Cynthia Ozick

The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew. — Cynthia Ozick

All politicians know that every 'temporary' political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever. — Cynthia Ozick

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

Literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it. — Cynthia Ozick

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

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes. — Cynthia Ozick

To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists. — Cynthia Ozick

I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something. — Cynthia Ozick

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself. — Cynthia Ozick

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened. — Cynthia Ozick

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters. — Cynthia Ozick

It is true that money attracts; but much money repels. — Cynthia Ozick

We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes. — Cynthia Ozick

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

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

All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible. — Cynthia Ozick

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it. — Cynthia Ozick

There was a period ... when I used to say, with as much ferocity as I could muster, 'I hate Henry James, and I wish he was dead.' Influence is perdition. — Cynthia Ozick

In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it. — Cynthia Ozick

Old saws have no teeth. — Cynthia Ozick

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

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better. — 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

Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language. — Cynthia Ozick

Whoever utters 'Kafkaesque' has neither fathomed nor intuited nor felt the impress of Kafka's devisings. If there is one imperative that ought to accompany any biographical or critical approach, it is that Kafka is not to be mistaken for the Kafkaesque. — Cynthia Ozick

I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.' ... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life. — Cynthia Ozick

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence. — Cynthia Ozick

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, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader. — Cynthia Ozick

I had the idea in my twenties that a writer could immediately become the late Henry James. Henry James himself had to mature. Even Saul Bellow did. — Cynthia Ozick

My first encounter with James was when I was seventeen. My brother brought home from the public library a science fiction anthology, which included 'The Beast in the Jungle.' It swept me away. I had a strange, somewhat uncanny feeling that it was the story of my life. — 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

I think that fanaticism is terrific. As long as you don't have to live with it. Oh, yes, nobody should marry a writer. — Cynthia Ozick

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self. — Cynthia Ozick

In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: it's the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance. — Cynthia Ozick

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

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief. — Cynthia Ozick

The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about. — Cynthia Ozick

In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities. — Cynthia Ozick

To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne. — Cynthia Ozick

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas. — Cynthia Ozick

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it ... — Cynthia Ozick

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

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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

The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred. — Cynthia Ozick

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick

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. — Cynthia Ozick