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

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb.
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Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self.
Cynthia Ozick
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Time at length becomes justice.
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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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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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Old saws have no teeth.
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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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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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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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The trouble with happiness is that it never notices itself.
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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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Death persecutes before it executes.
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The engineering is secondary to the vision.
Cynthia Ozick
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
Cynthia Ozick