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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

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
Able
Shields
Writing
Instantly
Kind
Transforming
Way
Hiding
Honey
Becomes
Pain
Write
Shield

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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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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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The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
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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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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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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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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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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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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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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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