57 quotes found
Writer · American · 1928
American writer (born 1928)
“To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded.”
“The lower imagination, the weaker, falls into the proliferation of images. My hope is someday to be able to figure out a connection between the work of monotheism-imagining and the work of story-im...”
“The insight that the largest, deepest, widest imaginative faculty of all is what you need to be a monotheist teaches me that you simply cannot be a Jew if you repudiate the imagination.”
“It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!”
“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.”
“...this is very nice, cozy. You got a nice cozy place, Lublin. Cramped, Rosa said. I work from a different theory. For everything, there's a bad way of describing, also a good way. You pick the goo...”
“Because she fears the past she distrusts the future — it, too, will turn into the past.”
“In the middle of the war there was Heine, there was Goethe, there was Schiller. I did posters for the German club, in the middle of the war. When I think back to how happy I was, studying German an...”
“I think the word is intractable. I blame the lack of live and let live. And which side is it coming from more than the other side? I think it is coming from people who call other people infidels. T...”
“Sometimes repugnance overrides psychological curiosity, and sometimes psychological curiosity is no more illuminating than pornography.”
“I have argued this question, novel versus essays, and I do come out on the novel side. Because though both these forms use intellect and imagination, they do it in different proportions — the essay...”
“I always knew that this was what I wanted to do. I think this is true of most writers — especially anybody who's read Little Women, which is every writer. Not so much the male writers, let's admit ...”
“I don't think one writes for immortality. I think beginning writers always think they will have fame. But if fame — which is power — is what you want, then you'll get it, probably. But it's not som...”
“She is the master of the casual, searing image; in a department store in Foreign Bodies, a woman is ambushed by floating tongues of perfume. During an awkward conversation between two people a stil...”
“Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition a...”
“I've read...some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick.”
“Remember Cynthia Ozick's story, The Shawl? In that extraordinarily moving story, Ozick doesn't once mention the word, Holocaust; she focuses on the conflicts of a mother and her two daughters tryin...”
