Quote

We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

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
Fear
Animals
Death
Merely
Another
Constant
Without
Exist
Love
Birth
Outside
Fated
Animal
Lifted
Living
Hardly

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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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Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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Writers take words seriously-perha ps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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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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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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