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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.

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
Literature
Paltry
Spies
Spy
Infancy
Secrets
Discovered
Shame
Secret

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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
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We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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Fraud makes the world go round.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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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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Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.
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