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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.

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
Way
Things
Seeming
Quality
Wrong
Firsts
First
Right

More quotes by John Updike

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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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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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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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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 no other sport must the spectator move.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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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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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
John Updike
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The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.
John Updike
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
John Updike
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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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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.
John Updike
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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike