John Updike Quotes

Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.

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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept -- the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

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Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.

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You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.

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Possession diminishes perception of value, immediately.

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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

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A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.

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Upon shaving off one's beard. The scissors cut the long-grown hair the razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, bug-eyed, I stare at the forgotten boy I was.

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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.

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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.

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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead

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I secretly understood the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is-its irresistible charm-a fire.

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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.

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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.

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Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

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Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.

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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.

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The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you, and industry can't take you.

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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

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