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Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.
John Updike
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
John Updike
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All dancing is now is standing in place and letting the devil of the music enter you.
John Updike
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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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The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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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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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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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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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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers; our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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Why does life feel, to us as we experience it, so desperately urgent and so utterly pointless at the same time?
John Updike
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Quote of the day
At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.
Lafcadio Hearn
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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life
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