Cynthia Ozick (b.1928) is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and intellectual whose works examine being Jewish in contemporary life.
Born in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Ozick was educated at New York University and Ohio State University. In college, she became obsessed with Henry James, and she spent seven years trying to write a novel in his style. Her first novel, Trust (1966,) is the story of a woman’s rejection of her wealthy American Jewish family and her search for her renegade father in Europe.
Ozick’s well-known works, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971,) Bloodshed (1976,) Levitation (1982,) The Cannibal Galaxy (1983,) and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987,) express the Jewish ethos, mysticism, and history.
Ozick has also written essays on life and literature, collected in volumes such as Art and Ardor (1983,) Metaphor & Memory (1989,) Fame & Folly (1996,) Quarrel & Quandary (2000,) The Din in the Head (2006,) and Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays (2016.)
Ozick’s recent novels include The Puttermesser Papers (1997) and The Bear Boy (2005.) Henry James’s The Ambassadors inspired her novel Foreign Bodies (2010.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Cynthia Ozick
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
Topics: Man, Body, Mankind
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
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Madness
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Gratitude
Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.
—Cynthia Ozick
To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Imagination
After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Face, 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
Topics: Facts
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
Topics: Blessings, Difficulty, Obstacles, Gratitude, Goal, Vision, Right, Goals, Aspirations
What we remember from childhood we remember forever—permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Childhood, Memory
The engineering is secondary to the vision.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Vision, Engineering
In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
—Cynthia Ozick
Topics: Communication
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