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
Uglier
Joy
Caterpillar
Beautiful
Caterpillars
Better
Transitory
Lure
Butterfly

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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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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Old saws have no teeth.
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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.
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The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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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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Godlessness invariably produces vulgarity. Civilization is the product of belief.
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In saying what is obvious, never choose cunning. Yelling works better.
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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.
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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 want to be what one can be is purpose in life.
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The imagination is a species of knowledge, knowledge that can take the form of discovery.
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I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.
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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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History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.
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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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Time at length becomes justice.
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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
Cynthia Ozick
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There's a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
Cynthia Ozick