"Cynthia Ozick" is an American-Jewish short story writer, novelist, and essayist.

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

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.

To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.

Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.

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.

I find that writing comes from the three fingers. The thumb, the index and middle fingers. It flows out of the pen. Real writing comes out of your hand, for me, anyway.

In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning, yelling works better.

Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

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