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
Regard
Becoming
Lures
Joy
Uglier
Beautiful
Caterpillar
Better
Caterpillars
Transitory
Lure
Butterfly

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
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One reason writers write is out of revenge. Life hurts certain ideas and experiences hurt one wants to clarify, to set out illuminations, to replay the old bad scenes and get the Treppenworte said -- the words one didn't have the strength or ripeness to say when those words were necessary for one's dignity or survival.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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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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We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
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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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In 1952, I had gone to England on a literary pilgrimage, but what I also saw, even at that distance from the blitz, were bombed-out ruins and an enervated society, while the continent was still, psychologically, in the grip of its recent atrocities.
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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 ordinary is the divine.
Cynthia Ozick
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
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One reason writers write is out of revenge.
Cynthia Ozick