John Updike Quotes
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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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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks latenesses, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patchings to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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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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Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
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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.
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'...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.'
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'Things change,' says Mr Shimada. 'Is world's sad secret.'
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The smell of good advice always makes Rabbit want to run the other way.
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There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.
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He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.
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We hope the 'real' person behind the words will be revealed as ignominiously as a shapeless snail without its shapely shell.
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In show business you learn to let it slide off your back. You know, fuck 'em. Otherwise you'd kill yourself.
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Nelson '...People are crazy. At times when I'm with clients I can't see the difference between them and me, except for the structure we're all in. I get paid, a little, and they get taken care of, a little.'
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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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Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students to the stars.
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'Did Nelson ever tell you the story,' Pru asks Annabelle, 'how he lost the agency up his nose?'
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He didn't have a worry in the world back then. He was in paradise and didn't know it.
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Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
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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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Mr Shimada 'Toyota does not enjoy bad games prayed with its ploduct.'
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Who would have thought that the Internet, that's supposed to knit the world into a shining tyranny-proof ball, would be so grubbily adolescent?
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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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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle 'She's letting herself go. You can't afford in life to do that if you're gonna contend.'
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...he feels a stifling uselessness in things, a kind of atomic decay whereby the precious glowing present turns, with each tick of the clock, into the leaden slag of history.