Cynthia Ozick
Recipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008.
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."
“A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles' and cousins' books, tablets and capsules and powders...and then one day you find yourself leaning here, writing on that round glass table salvaged from the Park View Pharmacy--writing this, an impossibility, a summary of who you came to be where you are now, and where, God knows, is that?”
Cynthia Ozick
“James (like the far more visceral Conrad) seizes your life. ”
Cynthia Ozick
“We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.”
Cynthia Ozick
“This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock.”
Cynthia Ozick
“If we had to say what writing is, we would have to define it essentially as an act of courage.”
Cynthia Ozick
“What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.”
Cynthia Ozick