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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.

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
Hard
Thing
Love
Lovely
People
Memory
Fronts
Front
Memories
Easy

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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.
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Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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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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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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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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Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.
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I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.
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Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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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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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
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Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.
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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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