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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.

John Updike

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John Updike
Age: 76 †
Born: 1932
Born: March 18
Died: 2009
Died: January 27
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
John Hoyer Updike
Constraints
Breath
Breaths
Develop
Marriage
Aping
Firsts
Freest
First
Constrain
Adultery

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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?
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Cities aren't like people they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea.
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