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

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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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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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Traveling is seeing it is the implicit that we travel by.
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The imagination has resources and intimations we don't even know about.
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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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Two things remain irretrievable: time and a first impression.
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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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The secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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Every writer aspires to recognition , and it comes entirely privately, without public fanfare, each time a piece of work is judged worthy of publication.
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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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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.
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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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Old saws have no teeth.
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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 books, as in life, there are no second chances. On second thought: its the next work, still to be written, that offers the second chance.
Cynthia Ozick
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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick