Cynthia Ozick Quotes

We often 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.

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.

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.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

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

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?

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

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