Top 80 Cynthia Ozick Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Cynthia Ozick

2. “To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.”

— Cynthia Ozick

3. “Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.”

— Cynthia Ozick

4. “The ordinary is the divine.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

8. “Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.”

— Cynthia Ozick

9. “Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn’t matter.”

— Cynthia Ozick

10. “Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting-far, far away-what you last met at home.”

— Cynthia Ozick

11. “What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”

— Cynthia Ozick

12. “In books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.”

— Cynthia Ozick

13. “One reason writers write is out of revenge.”

— Cynthia Ozick

14. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

15. “The secular Jew is a figment; when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.”

— Cynthia Ozick

16. “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 get along better.”

— Cynthia Ozick

17. “The imagination has resources and intimations we don’t even know about.”

— Cynthia Ozick

18. “I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.”

— Cynthia Ozick

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

22. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

23. “The engineering is secondary to the vision.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

25. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

26. “Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers – and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.”

— Cynthia Ozick

27. “The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.”

— Cynthia Ozick

28. “Time heals all things but one: Time.”

— Cynthia Ozick

29. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

30. “Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

32. “Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.”

— Cynthia Ozick

33. “Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it – so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.”

— Cynthia Ozick

34. “There’s a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.”

— Cynthia Ozick

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

35. “Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.”

— Cynthia Ozick

36. “Old saws have no teeth.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

38. “All politicians know that every ‘temporary’ political initiative promised as a short-term poultice stays on the books forever.”

— Cynthia Ozick

39. “Lie, illusion, deception, she said – was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?”

— Cynthia Ozick

40. “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

41. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

42. “By replacing history with fantasy, the Palestinians have invented a society unlike any other, where hatred trumps bread. They have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

44. “I read in desperate snatches in the interstices of the Quotidian, and dream of finding three uninterrupted quiet hours to think, moon, mentally maunder, and, above all, write. I am pursued by an anti-Muse; her name is Life. Her homely multisyllabic surname is often left unenunciated, but to certain initiates it may be whispered: Exigency.”

— Cynthia Ozick

45. “He who cries, ‘What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,’ does not know even that.”

— Cynthia Ozick

46. “It is useless either to hate or to love truth – but it should be noticed.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

49. “Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.”

— Cynthia Ozick

50. “Time at length becomes justice.”

— Cynthia Ozick