We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.

The line points to a common moral blind spot: familiarity dulls perception. What is constant—health, safety, friendship, ordinary freedoms, daily sustenance—can become invisible precisely because it is reliable, while rarer events command attention. Ozick’s phrasing suggests that gratitude is not merely a spontaneous feeling but a discipline of noticing: the most “deserving” objects of thanks are often the least dramatic and therefore the most easily ignored. The quote also implies an ethical recalibration, urging readers to measure value by dependence and significance rather than novelty, and to resist the entitlement that grows when blessings are treated as defaults.