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

More quotes by Cynthia Ozick

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In real life wishing, divorced from willing, is sterile and begets nothing.
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Time heals all things but one: Time.
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What I felt then I feel now: the inexorable, unchanging interior hum of doubt and hope.
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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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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.
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Death persecutes before it executes.
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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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The ordinary is the divine.
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Paradise is only for those who have already been there.
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very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
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We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
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Awe consumes any brand that ignites it.
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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 secular Jew is a figment when a Jew becomes a secular person he is no longer a Jew.
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literature is an instrument of a culture, not a summary of it.
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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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It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.
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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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Is there a word more passionate than passion? Obsession, total immersion, the feeling that everything else doesn't matter.
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