Top 80 Cynthia Ozick Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.”

— Cynthia Ozick

52. “Life is that which – pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially – interrupts.”

— Cynthia Ozick

53. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

54. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

55. “Awe consumes any brand that ignites it...”

— Cynthia Ozick

56. “It is true that money attracts; but much money repels.”

— Cynthia Ozick

57. “In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.”

— Cynthia Ozick

58. “People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.”

— Cynthia Ozick

59. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

60. “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.”

— Cynthia Ozick

61. “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

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

— Cynthia Ozick

63. “Death persecutes before it executes.”

— Cynthia Ozick

64. “You can never tell how genes ricochet.”

— Cynthia Ozick

65. “I think about fanaticism – oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic; you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

68. “She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.”

— Cynthia Ozick

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

— Cynthia Ozick

70. “The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.”

— Cynthia Ozick

71. “The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.”

— Cynthia Ozick

72. “To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one’s psychological distance from the supreme artists.”

— Cynthia Ozick

73. “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

74. “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

75. “Admittedly, there is always a golden age, the one not ours, the one that once was or will someday be. One’s own time is never satisfactory, except to the very rich or the smugly oblivious.”

— Cynthia Ozick

76. “Comedy springs from the ludicrous; but the ludicrous is stuck in the muck of reality, resolutely hostile to what is impossible.”

— Cynthia Ozick

77. “Brilliant students make good aides.”

— Cynthia Ozick

78. “Paradise is only for those who have already been there.”

— Cynthia Ozick

79. “Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents; and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.”

— Cynthia Ozick

80. “Whoever mourns the dead mourns himself.”

— Cynthia Ozick

81. “I write in terror... I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes every syllable.”

— Cynthia Ozick

82. “Death’s reliable.”

— Cynthia Ozick

83. “If a novel’s salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.”

— Cynthia Ozick

84. “Because she fears the past she distrusts the future – it, too, will turn into the past.”

— Cynthia Ozick