John Updike Quotes
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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...they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.
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Nelson, re. Annabelle ...'she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.'
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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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The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
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Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away. 'That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?'
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An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
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Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
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'Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.'
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...golf appeals to the idiot in us, and the child. … Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
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Judy, 8, is watching TV He tells Judy, 'Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing.' But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.
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Re Florida Just not being senile is considered great down here.
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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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Annabelle '...health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much.'
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Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't.
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Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
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God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.
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Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
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'Well,' his father says, 'I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.'
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Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
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Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.