Cynthia Ozick quotes

" After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces. " # Faces # Biography # Responsibility

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

" 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. " # Body # Death and Dying # Babies

" 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. " # Facts # Gossip # Thoughts and Thinking

" The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap. " # Madness # Morality # Fame

" In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better. " # Obvious # Choice # Deception

" 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. " # Writers and Writing # Revenge # Life and Living

" Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. " # Secrets # Travel and Tourism # Life and Living

" The engineering is secondary to the vision. " # Engineering # Vision # Books - Reading

" The engineering is secondary to the vision. " # Engineering # Vision # Books - Reading