John Updike Quotes
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re the human heart That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.
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There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
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'Tell me, Nelson, I'm just curious. How does it feel to have smoked up your parents' house in crack?'
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'Look, Nelson. Maybe I haven't done everything right in my life. I know I haven't. But I haven't committed the greatest sin. I haven't laid down and died.'
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When Rabbit first began to drive the road was full of old fogeys going too slow and now it seems nothing but kids in a hell of a hurry, pushing. Let 'em by, is his motto. Maybe they'll kill themselves on a telephone pole in the next mile. He hopes so.
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Dr Breit 'It's irrational, but so's the human species.'
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Each set of woes can be left behind in a folder in a drawer at the end of the day. Whereas in the outside world there is no end of obligation, no protection from the needs and grief of others.
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...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.
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I think 'taste' is a social concept and not an artistic one. I’m willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else’s living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another’s brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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There was a beauty here, refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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Life is noise.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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This is the last night when he is nowhere. Tomorrow, life will find him again.
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She closes her eyes and wordlessly thinks of all the misery sex has caused the world...
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He supposes they pretty much have the picture. Most people do, in life. People know more than they let on.
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A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?
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Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
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Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
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coming away from the doctor's after a check-up Get interested is the advice, but in truth you are interested in less and less. It's Nature's way.
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It was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance which Hollywood and bohunk America conducted almost in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.
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As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...
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'You are cynical.'
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at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward 'What's wrong with his heart, exactly?' Janice asks.