Tis the Season to Be Grateful--to Cynthia Ozick?

If you look for a quote on gratitude to spice up an email, tweet, or Facebook post this Thanksgiving season, one of the top ones you'll find is by American novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick:

"We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude."

It's everywhere: Goodreads, Tumblr, Pinterest, QuotesRUs--you name it.

But I've read Ozick for years: novels, stories, interviews. I've even reviewed her. She's got a dazzling mind, she's very funny, and she can be quite acerbic. That quote, though.... I had to investigate.




Academic Hollis Robbins describes what happened next for me:

You come across a pithy quote by a famous author that doesn't sound quite right. No source text is given. A general web search yields ten pages of links to self-help sites or quote-a-day webpages. A Google Books or Google Scholar search will offer links to published self-help books or articles going back to the 1980s. None of the sites will offer a full citation or even gesture toward a source text.


Robbins was actually writing about a much more famous quotation that's been falsely ascribed to George Eliot across the Internet (and everywhere else): "It is never too late to be what you might have been."

Both of those quotations make great kitchen magnets. Both of them sound as if they could have been written by the same person working for Hallmark. Unless Mark Twain was the source (j/k).

But if anyone knows for sure that Ozick actually wrote or said those words above, let me know. I'd be grateful.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Lev Raphael is the author of the suspense novel Assault with a Deadly Lie and 24 other books in many genres.

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