Quote

The butterfly lures us not only because he is beautiful, but because he is transitory. The caterpillar is uglier, but in him we can regard the better joy of becoming.

Cynthia Ozick

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Cynthia Ozick
Age: 96
Born: 1928
Born: April 17
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Better
Caterpillars
Transitory
Lure
Butterfly
Regard
Becoming
Lures
Joy
Uglier
Beautiful
Caterpillar

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
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We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection to anything at all is taken as a full-scale revolution. Should any soul speak up in favor of the obvious, it is taken as a symptom of the influence of the left, the right, the pink, the black, the dangerous. An idea for its own sake - especially an obvious idea - has no respectability.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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Fiction does not invent out of a vacuum, but it invents and what it invents is, first, the fabric and cadence of language, and then a slant of idea that sails out of these as a fin lifts from the sea.
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Time at length becomes justice.
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Old saws have no teeth.
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To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
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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, dont confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.
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I can't claim to be disenchanted with the current state of fiction because I read so little of it. My reading is mostly drawn to history.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
Cynthia Ozick
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
Cynthia Ozick
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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The ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick