It had always been my habit-- privately I felt it to be an ecstasy-- to enter, as into a mysterious vault, any public library. I was drawn to books that had been read before, novels that girls like myself had cradled and cherished. In my mind-- I suppose in my isolation-- I seized on all those previous readers, and everyone who would read after me, as phantom companions and secret friends.

— Cynthia Ozick

It seemed to Rosa Lublin that the whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret. Everyone had left behind a real life. Here they had nothing. They were all scarecrows, blown about under the murdering sun ball with empty rib cages.

— Cynthia Ozick

Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?

— Cynthia Ozick

Profound subject can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

— Cynthia Ozick

Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.

— Cynthia Ozick

The engineering is secondary to the vision.

— Cynthia Ozick

The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren't the lords of the earth.

— Cynthia Ozick

The novella will be called, I think, “The Messiah of Stockholm.” It takes place in Stockholm. I’d better say no more, or the Muse will wipe it out.

— Cynthia Ozick

To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'

— Cynthia Ozick

Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.

— Cynthia Ozick