John Updike Quotes
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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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...there ought to be a law that we change identities and families every ten years or so.
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Harry, to Thelma, about Janet 'She never really figured out how the world is put together but she's still working at it.'
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Freedom, that he always thought was outward motion, turns out to be this inward dwindling.
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The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.
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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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The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you're going before you go there.
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'...Cocaine. The stuff is everywhere.'
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Mim to Nelson 'Your father wasn't stupid, he just acted stupid.'
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Nelson, to Harry '...I keep feeling hassled.'
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Weeds don't know they're weeds.
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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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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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You don't know what you don't know.
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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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There's more to being a human being than having your own way.
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Women: you never know which side they want to dance on.
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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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Like water, blood must run or grow scum.
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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.
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Halfway isn't all the way, but it's better than no way.
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I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is - its irresistible charm - a fire.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.