We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.

Cynthia Ozick

Categorized in : Ideas Soul Taken

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

Cynthia Ozick

thanksgiving thankful thank-you

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.

Cynthia Ozick

taken-for-granted gratitude skulls

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.

Cynthia Ozick

visitors going-away travel

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

Cynthia Ozick

childhood memories children

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

Cynthia Ozick

acts-of-courage ifs writing

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Cynthia Ozick

ambition writing order

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

Cynthia Ozick

numbers inspirational years

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

Cynthia Ozick

language-and-power kind writing

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

Cynthia Ozick

purpose dream want

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

Cynthia Ozick

butterfly joy beautiful

It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed.

Cynthia Ozick

useless hate truth

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by.

Cynthia Ozick

seeing journey travel

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.

Cynthia Ozick

mistake people ideas

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination

Cynthia Ozick

imagination use inspirational

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

Cynthia Ozick

engineering vision inspirational

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

Cynthia Ozick

distance psychological artist

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

Cynthia Ozick

teaching kings school

Time heals all things but one: Time.

Cynthia Ozick

heal all-things time

He who cries, 'What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me,' does not know even that.

Cynthia Ozick

cry care doe

Paradise is only for those who have already been there.

Cynthia Ozick

paradise native-american