189 Quotes by Cynthia Ozick

If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

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.

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.

...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 good way, you go along better.""I don't like to give myself lies," Rosa said."Life is short, we all got to lie.

The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

The Germans are sentimental. Their word Heimweh. The English say homesick; the same in plain Swedish. Hemsjuk. Leave it to the Germans to pull out, like some endless elastic belt of horrible sweetness, all that molasses woe.

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

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.

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.