Cynthia Ozick Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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?

Time at length becomes justice.

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

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.

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

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

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

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.

Life is that which - pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially - interrupts.

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.

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.

Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.

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

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

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.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.

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

Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.

It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.

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

We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution.

In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.