Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozickis an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth17 April 1928
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
dream want purpose
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
mistake ideas gossip
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.
imagination use imagine
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination
numbers years age
After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.
figments secular jew
The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
abuse rotten culture
Language makes culture, and we make a rotten culture when we abuse words.
advice teeth saws
Old saws have no teeth.
admiration fame ignite
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it ...
sorrow shapes way
We were born to die; we were born to endure, on the way to death, sorrow-sorrow in manifold shapes.
listening thrones ifs
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
admit burned circumstance fabric hole imagination intent modernism ordinary
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.'
sacred
The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.
henry
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.
beast brother brought encounter feeling fiction home included james library life public science somewhat swept
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.