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

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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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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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To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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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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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
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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.
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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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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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