Foreign Bodies Quotes

“She thought: How hard it is to change one’s life. And again she thought: How terrifyingly simple to change the lives of others.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies

“The ground was scorched, the streets teemed with refugees, and these Americans were playing at fleeing! As if they had something to resent, to despise, to scorn, to run away from! As if they weren't the lords of the earth.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies

“You can never tell how genes ricochet.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies

“I haven’t got the goddamnedest idea of what the hell you’re talking about. Kierkeguard, what’s that? Sounds like deodorant, which is to say that the whole thing smells as far as I’m concerned.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies

“He’s a kid from L.A., they drink sunshine and milk.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies

“If introspection is thought, Marvin was not introspective. He felt the contempt he lived under as raw sensation, as heat--heat in the ears, behind the eyes, in the tangled ganglia sheathed by the skull. And contempt, it seemed, was no different from fear. At Princeton he became afraid. It dawned on him that it was not enough to be bright (all Townsend Harris boys were bright): you had to be right. For the first time he was struck by the import of birthright--you slid out of the womb grasping it in your tiny fist, a certificate that guaranteed you would know how to speak and dress and scorn and brazenly intimidate everyone doomed to enter the world empty-handed. Not that Marvin was altogether empty-handed--he had his scholarship, and he had, most of all, the engine of his will and the grim burden of his hurt. He resisted humiliation by accepting it, sometimes almost appearing to invite it: it taught him what was suitable and what wasn't.”
― Cynthia Ozick, Foreign Bodies