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There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.
John Updike -
As if pity is, as he has been taught, not a helpless outcry but a powerful tide that could redeem the world...
John Updike
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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
John Updike -
at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward 'What's wrong with his heart, exactly?' Janice asks.
John Updike -
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.
John Updike -
Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
John Updike -
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
John Updike -
When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
John Updike
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
John Updike -
Harry, to Thelma, about Janet 'She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it.'
John Updike -
'You are cynical.'
John Updike -
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
John Updike -
Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
John Updike -
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
John Updike
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re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune' She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
John Updike -
Nelson, to Annabelle 'The misery of the world,' he says, reaching into himself to overcome her resistance. 'That's what I kept thinking during my group this morning – the pity of everything, all of us, these confused souls trying so pathetically hard to break out of the fog – to see through our compulsions, our needs as they chew us up...'
John Updike -
'...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.'
John Updike -
Like water, blood must run or grow scum.
John Updike -
This airport has been designed with big windows viewing the runways, so if there's a crash everybody can feast upon it with their own eyes. The fireball, the fuselage doing a slow skidding twirl, shedding its wings.
John Updike -
You don't know what you don't know.
John Updike
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The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
John Updike -
'I mean,' he says, 'how the hell do you think it feels? Sitting there and having the plane explode?'
John Updike -
Nelson '...One nice thing about Florida, it makes Pennsylvania look unspoiled.'
John Updike -
He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.
John Updike