Cynthia Ozick Quotes

Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

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

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

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.

Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.

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

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

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

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

Time heals all things but one: Time.

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.

The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.

Death persecutes before it executes.

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.

The ordinary is the divine.