John Updike Quotes
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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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Cars used to have such dashing shapes, like airplanes, back when gas was cheap, twenty-five cents a gallon.
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about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.
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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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...'That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up.'
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Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.
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Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, 'You ever been to Toledo?'
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Late in the game as it is, you keep trying.
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Re Annabelle ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.
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Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
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One thing he knows is if he had to give parts of his life back the last thing he'd give back is the fucking.
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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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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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...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.
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'Things change,' says Mr Shimada. 'Is world's sad secret.'
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One out of three hundred and twelve Americans is a bore, for instance, and 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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All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
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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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These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.
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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't; whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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Thelma '...You make your own punishments in life, I honest to God believe that. You get exactly what you deserve. God sees to it.'
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You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI.
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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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A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.