Cynthia Ozick Quotes

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

~ Cynthia Ozick

Get thee to the novel! - the novel, that word-woven submarine, piloted by intimation and intuition, that will dive you to the deeps of the heart's maelstrom.

~ Cynthia Ozick

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

~ Cynthia Ozick

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?

~ 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

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

The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

~ 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

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

~ Cynthia Ozick

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

~ Cynthia Ozick

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

~ 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

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 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

Hebrew as a contemporary language, especially for poetry, is no longer the language of the Bible; but neither is it not the language of the Bible.

~ 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