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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
... woman is frequently praised as the more creative sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To listen acutely is to be powerless, even if you sit on a throne.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
I think about fanaticism - oblivion awaits, especially for minor writers, so you have to be a fanatic you have to be a crank to keep going, but on the other hand, what else would you do with the rest of your life? You gotta do something.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
To be any sort of competent writer one must keep one's psychological distance from the supreme artists.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Old saws have no teeth.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society's logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scrap.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Dedication to one's work in the world is the only possible sanctifica-tion. Religion in all its forms is dedication to Someone Else's work, not yours.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
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.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
Cynthia Ozick
Image
Death persecutes before it executes.
Cynthia Ozick