189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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