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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

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
Something
Horrendous
Smallness
Reduce
Witness
Suddenly
Fighting
Keep
Great
Summoned

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Being naked approaches being revolutionary going barefoot is mere populism.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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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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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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We are fated to love one another we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.
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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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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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In general, the churches, visited by me often on weekdays... bore for me the same relation to God that billboards did to Coca-Cola they promoted thirst without quenching it.
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Appealingness is inversely proportional to attainability.
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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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Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.
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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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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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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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