1928-, American Novelist, short-story Writer
After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces.
Cynthia Ozick – [Faces]
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 – [Facts]
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick – [Obvious]
One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts; certain ideas and experiences hurt; one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said — the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
Cynthia Ozick – [Writers and Writing]
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick – [Madness]
Wondrous hole! Magical hole! Dazzlingly influential hole! Noble and effulgent hole! From this hole everything follows logically: first the baby, then the placenta, then, for years and years and years until death, a way of life. It is all logic, and she who lives by the hole will live also by its logic. It is, appropriately, logic with a hole in it.
Cynthia Ozick – [Body]