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My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.
John Updike
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It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.
John Updike
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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
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The most miraculous thing is happening. The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. "Mr. Kohler, What kind of God is showing through, exactly?"
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When, on those anvils at the center of stars, and those even more furious anvils of the exploding supernovae, the heavy elements were beaten together to the atomic number 94...
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I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.
John Updike
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Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.
John Updike
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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
John Updike
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.
John Updike
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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
John Updike
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A post-heroic herbivore, I come to breakfast liking for A bite. Behind the box of Brex I find Tyrannosaurus rex.
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You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.
John Updike
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand; but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa's raft, small and sinking, and one's instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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It's a man's world, they say; but in its daily textures it is a world created by and for women.
John Updike
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The mad things dreamt up in the sky Discomfort our philosophy.
John Updike
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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The scissors cut the long-grown hair; The razor scrapes the remnant fuzz. Small-jawed, weak-chinned, big-eyed, I stare At the forgotten boy I was.
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And beyond our galaxy are other galaxies, in the universe all told at least a hundred billion, each containing a hundred billion stars. Do these figures mean anything to you?
John Updike
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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A writer's self-consciousness, for which he is much scorned, is really a mode of interestedness, that inevitably turns outward.
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Imagine nothing, a total vacuum. But wait! There's something in it! Points, potential geometry. A kind of dust of structurless points. Or, if that's too woolly for you, try "a Borel set of points not yet assembled into a manifold of any particular dimensionality."
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The zeros stared back, every one a wound leaking the word "poison." "That's the weight of the Sun," Caldwell said.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
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Quote of the day
Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.
Mary McCarthy
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)
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