Quotes from Cynthia Ozick

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.

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

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.

Death's reliable.

Nothing in the world can be sustained, neither bugles nor hope nor woe nor desire nor common well-being nor horns, and even redemption, that suspect covenant, can be revised by the bitter and loveless Christ to whom nothing, not even life, is irretrievable.

He's a kid from L.A., they drink sunshine and milk.

I haven't got the goddamnedest idea of what the hell you're talking about. Kierkeguard, what's that? Sounds like deodorant, which is to say that the whole thing smells as far as I'm concerned.

Like twinned with unlike is beauty's shock.

A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of the free mind at play. Though it is written in prose, it is closer in kind to poetry than to any other form. Like a poem, a genuine essay is made out of lenguage and character and mood and temperament and pluck and chance.

I fear the dark. The dark is where preexistence abides. It is not possible to think of pre-existence, but one dreads its facsimile: post-existence. Do not erase, obliterate, or annihilate me. Mother, my mother. I will serve you. Use me in the wide world.

instead he was being led away from his proper Emma by a woman who was conducting a revolution in his kitchen.

There stands the parable; there stands the sacred metaphor of belonging, one heart to another. WIthout the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart.

Not everything given away is recoverable.

But what was wanted—what was wanted for Mrs. Mitwisser—was simply Story: a story about men and women free of history, except their own.

You knew beforehand that when you opened the magazine you would find the nasty anger of the pure-hearted.

Eventually I understood that a man in possession of Bildung was more than merely cultivated: he was ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom.

We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

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

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

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

No, no, sometimes a person feels to be alone." "If you're alone too much," Persky said, "you think too much." "Without a life," Rosa answered, "a person lives where they can. If all they got is thoughts, that's where they live." "You ain't got a life?" "Thieves took it.

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?

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.

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.