John Updike Quotes
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When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.
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Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.
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If society is the prison, families are the cells, with no time off for good behavior. Good behavior in fact tends to lengthen the sentence.
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Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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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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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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'...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.'
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Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
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...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
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Pru, to Harry She tells him, 'You were one of the things I liked about Nelson. Maybe I thought Nelson would grow into somebody like you.'
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
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Charlie interrupts impatiently, 'Pain is where it's at for punks. Mutilation, self-hatred, slam dancing. For these kids today, ugly is beautiful. That's their way of saying what a lousy world we're giving them. No more rain forests. Toxic waste. You know the drill.'
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...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
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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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'...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months.' He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.
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He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.