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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.
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
Lying
Deceived
Overlooks
Difficult
Deceiving
Permits
Firsts
Deceit
Repair
First
Suspicion
Accepts
Lateness
Great
Permit
Deceive
Patching
Time
Absurd
Adultery
Quotidian
Excuse
Possesses
Rents
Accepting
Excuses
Antibodies
More quotes by John Updike
The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
John Updike
I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike
Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
John Updike
All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
John Updike
The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
John Updike
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
John Updike
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
John Updike
The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
John Updike
Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
John Updike
Seemed to me important in writing about people to be able to describe the sexual transactions between them. It's - for many people it's the height of, what they see, of ecstasy and poetry is in their sexual encounters. And furthermore, personality - human personality does not end in the bedroom, but persists.
John Updike
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.
John Updike
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
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.
John Updike
There are some women that don't do it for some men. That's why they turn out so many models.
John Updike
New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
John Updike
Our lives fade behind us before we die.
John Updike
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
The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
John Updike
Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
John Updike
As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
John Updike
