“After a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
“Cynthia Ozick, The Art of Fiction No. 95” (June 1985) Interview with Tom Teicholz, The Paris Review, No. 102, New York: The Paris Review, Spring 1987; online via The Paris Review, www.theparisreview.org
Extended excerpt: [Responding to the interviewer’s question about a photo that appears at the back of her book Art & Ardor]
“Anxiety at worst but not a scowl. I hope not a scowl! Especially since after a certain number of years, our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces.”
Source link: “Cynthia Ozick, The Art of Fiction No. 95” (Spring 1987) online via The Paris Review: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2693/the-art-of-fiction-no-95-cynthia-ozick
Title (date) source + link to material online or source information (ISBN/ISSN number)
“Fear of hostility is less useful than hostility to fear.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
Trust (1966) New York: New American Library, p. 560; online via Open Library [free subscription service] openlibrary.org
Extended excerpt [Fiction. Full verse cited – appears in a list of the narrative’s thoughts]:
“Fear of hostility is less useful than hostility to fear.” (p. 560)
Source link: Library – Trust (1966) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/trustnovel00ozic#page/560/mode/1up/search/communicable+disease
“Godlessness inevitably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
Trust (1966) New York: New American Library, p. 280; online via Open Library [free subscription service] openlibrary.org
Misquote notes: Some sources misquoted Ozick by substituting the word ‘inevitably’ for ‘invariably’:
Original text: “Godlessness inevitably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.”
Misquote: “Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.”
“Incorrect attribution/misquote in blue: color code 243569.” (Sentence only – please keep quotation marks in black.)
Extended excerpt [Fiction]:
“It was a story short, slight, and common; but it was not vulgar. If the story had been mine it would, I think, have been vulgar. Godlessness inevitably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.” (p. 280)
Source link: Library – Trust (1966) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/trustnovel00ozic#page/280/mode/2up/search/produces+vulgarity
“In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
“Morgan and Maurice: A Fairy Tale” (December 1971) Commentary magazine; reprint in Art & Ardor: Essays, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983, p. 64
Extended excerpt: [Book review; analysis of E.M. Forster’s Maurice]
“The essence of a fairy tale is that wishing does make it so: the wish achieves its own fulfillment through its very steadfastness of desire. That is why fairy tales, despite their dark tones and the vicissitudes they contain so abundantly, are so obviously akin to daydreams – daydreaming is a sloughing-off of society, not an analysis of it. To wish is not to explain; to wish is not to reform. In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.” (p. 64)
Source: Library – Art & Ardor: Essays (1983) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-394-53082-9
“In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
“We Are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables” (Spring 1972) Ms. magazine; reprint in The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Klagsbrun, New York: Warner Paperback Library ed., Sept. 1973, p. 65
Extended excerpt [End of essay segment, Part IV: ‘Propaganda’]:
“Moral: In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.” (p. 65)
Source: Editor’s copy – The First Ms. Reader (1972|1973 Warner Paperback Library ed.) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 772386
“Life is that which – pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially – interrupts.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
“How Writers Live Today” (August 1985) Esquire magazine; reprint as “Pear Tree and Polar Bear: A Word on Life and Art,” Metaphor & Memory, New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Borzoi Books, 1989, p. 111
Extended excerpt [Essay]:
“As for life, I don’t like it. I notice no “interplay of life and art.” Life is that which – pressingly, persistently, unfailingly, imperially – interrupts.” (p. 111)
Source: Library – Metaphor & Memory (1989) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-394-54701-2
“People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
“We Are the Crazy Lady and Other Feisty Feminist Fables” (Spring 1972) Ms. magazine; reprint in The First Ms. Reader, ed. Francine Klagsbrun, New York: Warner Paperback Library ed., Sept. 1973, p. 67
Extended excerpt [Essay, Part V: ‘Hormones’]:
“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.” (p. 67)
Source: Editor’s copy – The First Ms. Reader (1972|1973 Warner Paperback Library ed.) Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) No. 772386
“Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
Trust (1966) New York: New American Library, p. 558; online via Open Library [free subscription service] openlibrary.org
Extended excerpt [Fiction. Full line cited – appears in a list of the narrative’s thoughts]:
“Resentment is a communicable disease and should be quarantined.” (p. 558)
Source link: Library – Trust (1966) online via Open Library [free subscription service]: https://archive.org/stream/trustnovel00ozic#page/558/mode/1up/search/communicable+disease
“What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”
~Cynthia Ozick, American author
“Enchantments at First Encounter” (17 March 1985) The New York Times Magazine, Part II, in The New York Times, Vol. CXXIV, No. 46,351, New York: New York Times Company, p. 30, column 2 [pg. 529 of full edition .pdf file]; online via TimesMachine’ archive [subscription service] timesmachine.nytimes.com
Extended excerpt: [Essay]
“Travel returns us in just this way to sharpness of notice; and to be saturated in the sight of what is entirely new – the sun at an unaccustomed slope, stretched across the northland, separate from the infiltrating dusk that always seems about to fall through clear gray Stockholm – is to revisit the enigmatically lit puppet-stage outlines of childhood: those mental photographs and dreaming woodcuts or engravings that we retain from our earliest years. What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen. Travelers regain this ghost-seizing brightness, eeriness, firstness.”
Source note: “Enchantments at First Encounter” was later included as part of the essay “The Shock of Teapots” in Ozick’s Metaphors & Memory, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p. 143
Source link: “Enchantments at First Encounter” (17 March 1985) The New York Times Magazine; online via The New York Times, ‘TimesMachine’ archive [subscription service]: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1985/03/17/099586.html
Source [Text reprint, as part of essay “The Shock of Teapots”]: Library – Metaphors & Memory (1989) International Standard Book Number (ISBN) 0-394-54701-2
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