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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

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
Children
Zoos
Exotic
Leap
Mirrors
Entertainingly
Childhood
Predicament
Creatures
Predicaments
Human
Array
Humans
Leaps

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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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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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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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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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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
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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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Writing doesn't require drive. It's like saying a chicken has to have drive to lay an egg.
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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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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.
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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.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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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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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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