Cynthia Ozick Quotes

He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.

When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.

Parents should be encouraged to read to their children, and teachers should be equipped with all available techniques for teaching literacy, so the varying needs and capacities of individual kids can be taken into account.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there.

I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.

It is my fundamental conviction that compassion - the natural capacity of the human heart to feel concern for and connection with another human being - constitutes a basic aspect of our nature shared by all human beings, as well as being the foundation of our happiness. All ethical teachings, whether religious or nonreligious, aim to nurture this innate and precious quality, to develop it and to perfect it.

Through your love for each other, through learning the art of making one person happy, you learn to express your love for the whole of humanity and all beings. Please help us develop the curriculum for the Institute for the Happiness of One Person. Don't wait until we open the school. You can begin practicing right away.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

The phrase "Be Good to Each Other" is very important to me and something that I wish had been said more when I was in high school.

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge.

If someone is unpleasant to you, draw a halo around his or her head in your mind. He/she is an angel who came to teach you something.

This business of really knowing people, deep down, including your own self, it is not something you can learn in school or from a book. It takes your whole being to do it—your eyes and your ears, your brain and your heart. Maybe your heart most of all. —Bobby Goodspeed

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.

Let us cultivate love and compassion, both of which give life true meaning. This is the religion I preach. It is simple. Its temple is the heart. Its teaching is love and compassion. Its moral values are loving and respecting others, whoever they may be. Whether one is a lay person or a monastic, we have no other option if we wish to survive in this world.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

I didn't understand at the time why Vince was so interested in teaching me life lessons when all I was trying to do was get my video played. But now I think it's because he saw a little bit of himself in me. Just like me, he was a rebel who listened to no one and did whatever it took to get the job done, pissing people off with his stubbornness and drive in the process. Therefore, he was trying to teach me how to better myself instead of repeatedly getting into trouble by rubbing people the wrong way.

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.

We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.