A Quote by Cynthia Ozick

I don't like to read contemporary fiction while writing - I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don't want a jumble of other people's voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don't create static in that silence.

Cynthia Ozick

Quote Topics

Century Contemporary Contemporary Fiction Create Fiction Getting Isolation Jumble Kind Like My Way Need Other People Read Sense Silence Static Visions Voices Want Way While Writing

Quote Author

Cynthia Ozick
American - Novelist
Born: April 17, 1928

We cannot silence the voices that we do not like hearing. We can, however, do everything in our power to make certain that other voices are heard.

Deborah Prothrow-Stith

I now understand what Nelle Morton meant when she said that one of the great tasks in our time is to "hear people to speech." Behind their fearful silence, our students want to find their voices, speak their voices, have their voices heard. A good teacher is one who can listen to those voices even before they are spoken-so that someday they can speak with truth and confidence.

Parker J. Palmer

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Adrienne Rich

Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.

Pankaj Mishra

Sometimes I need silence; sometimes I need voices around - but not too loud or distinctive. I guess it depends on the piece in question, what stage I'm in. I think some voices can help me not to try too hard - especially at the beginning stages. Does that make sense? By some voice I mean, low chatter in the room. When there's low chatter in the room, I'm a little more relaxed, my mind might be a little more open.

Paul Lisicky

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.

James Joyce

There's a lot of magic in voices. I love voices that are very old, very gravelly, very deep. I like metallic voices; I like velvety voices. The voices of children.

Rosalia

For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways - to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.

Richard M. Nixon

I am not going to stand by as people like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg silence the voices of millions of conservatives.

Laura Loomer

Silence, yes, but what silence! For it is all very fine to keep silence, but one has also to consider the kind of silence one keeps.

Samuel Beckett

My desires are foolish. The things I want are better kept to myself. The hand of silence is steady. The hard blade of silence is clean like night. The code is absolute. Silence is eternal and patient. Silence never makes a fool of itself like I have so many times.

Henry Rollins

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh... Even the streams were now lifeless... No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

Rachel Carson

I work out of silence, because silence makes up for my actual lack of working space. Silence substitutes for actual space, for psychological distance, for a sense of privacy and intactness. In this sense silence is absolutely necessary.

Radka Donnell

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

John Ralston Saul

I have often said that domestic violence is characterised by silence: of the abused, of the abuser and of those who don't know how to intervene. But the media have the ability to break this corrosive silence: bringing us the voices of victims; shattering the taboo; and raising awareness of what we can all do to stop this heinous crime.