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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike
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...the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
John Updike -
Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.
John Updike -
Figure out where you're going before you go there: he was told that a long time ago.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
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.'
John Updike -
'...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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike -
That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
John Updike -
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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike -
From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
John Updike -
If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.
John Updike -
America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
John Updike -
Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike -
Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
John Updike
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I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
John Updike -
...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.
John Updike -
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
John Updike -
Harry having drawn at golf The shape of his collapse clings to him. Who says the universe isn't soaked in disgrace?
John Updike