His own image... was no longer the reflection of a clumsy, dirty, gray bird, ugly and offensive. He himself was a swan! Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.
Bio: James Douglas Graham Wood is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist. As of 2014, he is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine.