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Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.
Cynthia Ozick
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Books provide structure and guidance to the fluid nature of language, akin to how a riverbank guides a river.

This quote by Cynthia Ozick emphasizes the foundational role that books play in shaping and organizing language. Without the boundaries and context that books provide, language can become chaotic and unstructured, much like a river overflowing its banks. Books serve as essential guides that help to channel and enhance our understanding and usage of language, transforming it from mere chatter into something more profound and meaningful.

Themes

BooksLanguageEducationStructureExpression

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the importance of literacy, one might quote this to emphasize the value of books in shaping effective communication.

More from Cynthia Ozick

I don't agree with the sentiment 'write what you know.'... I think one should write what one doesn't know. The world is bigger and wider and more complex than our small subjective selves. One should prod, goad the imagination.
Cynthia OzickRead
I'm not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called "scientific" mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers; they are gossips.
Cynthia OzickRead
An article can be timely, topical, engaged in the issues and personalities of the moment; it is likely to be stale within the month. In five years, it may have acquired the quaint aura of a rotary phone. An article is usually Siamese-twinned to its date of birth.
Cynthia OzickRead
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 OzickRead
No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
Cynthia OzickRead
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 OzickRead

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