John Updike Quotes
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Something about being helpless in bed, people hit you up for sympathy. They've got you where they want you.
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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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There is very little thanks in history. Dog eat dog.
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The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
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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.
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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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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
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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.
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The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
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Mim, to Nelson, about Annabelle, aged 39 'This little nursie's not your problem. At thirty-nine, everybody's their own problem...'
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Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
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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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Nelson, to Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
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Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
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The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.
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Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
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Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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'...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.'
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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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.
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'Whenever somebody tells me to do something my instinct's always to do the opposite. It's got me into a lot of trouble, but I've had a lot of fun.'
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You don't know what you don't know.
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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.