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I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.
John Updike
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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?
John Updike
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Life robs us of ourselves, piece by small piece. What is eventually left is someone else.
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But with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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[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..."
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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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He learned this much selling cars: offer the customer something he doesn't want, to make what he half-wants look better.
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Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.
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Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
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The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
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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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As in marriage, there is sharing [in golf]; we search for one another's lost balls, we comment helpfully upon one another's defective swings, we march more or less in the same direction, and we come together, like couples at breakfast and dinner, on the tees and on the greens.
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As all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality.
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
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... the Japanese interest him professionally. How do they and the Germans do it, when America's going down the tubes?
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... they were nobodies in the county, they would leave nothing behind but their headstones.
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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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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike
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Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't.
John Updike
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Thirty-six years old and he knows less than when he started. With the difference that now he knows how little he'll always know.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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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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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do — they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
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Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
John Updike
1960s © W. Earl Snyder
Born:
March 18, 1932
Died:
January 27, 2009
(aged 76)
Bio:
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic.
Known for:
Rabbit, Run (1960)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Rabbit Is Rich (1981)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
The Centaur (1963)
Most used words:
people
life
time
feel
love
men
nelson
golf
god
years
kind
children
women
sense
parents
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