Cynthia Ozick Quotes

...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.

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.

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!

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.

The lower imagination, the weaker, falls into the proliferation of images. My hope is someday to be able to figure out a connection between the work of monotheism-imagining and the work of story-imagining. Until now I have thought of these as enemies.

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

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

(What sustained you without publication during that period?) Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature...I no longer believe in Literature, capital L, with the same fervor I used to. I’ve learned to respect living, perhaps. I think I have gotten over my fear of largeness as well, because I have gotten over my awe—my idolatrous awe. Literature is not all there is in the world, I now recognize. It is, I admit, still my all, but it isn’t the all. And that is a difference I can finally see.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing...I read in order to find out what I need to know: To illuminate the riddle.

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

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

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. ("The Biological Premises of Our Sad Earth-Speck")

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)

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

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