Cynthia Ozick Quotes

A PILGRIM IS A WANDERER WITH A PURPOSE. A pilgrimage can be to a place - that's the best known kind - but it can also be for a thing. Mine is for peace, and that is why I am a Peace Pilgrim.

Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.

I believe that a man is converted when first he hears the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling his hitherto unconscious self.

No great inner event befalls those who summon it not.

Sin and forgiveness and falling and getting back up and losing the pearl of great price in the couch cushions but then finding it again, and again, and again? Those are the stumbling steps to becoming Real, the only script that's really worth following in this world or the one that's coming.

There has already been the karmic work: that what life has transformed in me, this initiation brought on, of necessity, by trials.

Eventually, I joined a church. I didn't go there to find a boyfriend; I truly wasn't looking for anyone other than the person I wanted to be.

For a master, the rewards gained along the way are fine, but they are not the main reason for the journey. Ultimately the master and the master's path are one. And if the traveler is fortunate - that is, if the path is complex and profound enough - the destination is two miles farther away for every mile he or she travels.

Only now have I finally realized that my life has been an unending field trip. And I have tried hard not to be a tourist. But to be an adventurer, a traveler, an explorer, a learner, and a pilgrim.

In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.

When you pray, things remain the same, but you begin to be different. The same thing when a man falls in love, his circumstances and conditions remain the same, but he has a sovereign preference in his heart for another person which transfigures everything!

Now, with God's help, I shall become myself.

The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life.

The spiritual process has always been referred to as a journey - constant change.

When you reach that deeper level, you can't go back.

You take a step, then another. That's the journey. But to take a step with your eyes open is not a journey at all, it's a remaking of your own mind.

Once you realize that the way you exist right now is not enough, that there is something more, your spiritual process has already begun.

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.

The spiritual process is always individual. You may sit in a group, but only the individual can evolve, only the individual can liberate himself.

The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward--into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.

Healing does not mean going back to the way things were before, but rather allowing what is now to move us closer to God.

Changing the world begins with the very personal process of changing yourself, the only place you can begin is where you are, and the only time you can begin is always now.

Like those in the valley behind us, most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.