“It’s so silly, and really it’s my own stupid fault. Ed’ll kill me, not for the money but like they say for the principle. You know. He thinks I’m a terrible slob that way, he’s a great one for believing in foreseeable actions. I lost the Buick last year, and the year before that I lost the baby in the parking lot. God, how I hate people of principle. All the persecutors of the world have been people of principle.” – Cynthia Ozick, “The Suitcase” (emphasis in original)
Category: Cynthia Ozick
“That baby should follow baby is God’s trick on us, but surely we too can have a trick on God? If we fabricate with our syllables an immortality passed from the spines of the old to the shoulders of the young, even God cannot spite it. If the prayer-load that spilled upward from the mass graves should somehow survive! If not the thicket of lamentation itself, then the language on which it rode.” – Cynthia Ozick, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America”
“We judge a myth by its practical influences, and are obliged to ask it practical questions: What do you intend? Who should respect you? What will you cause? What do you disclose about envy, cruelty, lust, hope, growth, power, choice, faith, pity? Whose mouth should receive you?” – Cynthia Ozick, The Cannibal Galaxy