Quote

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.

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
Time
Suspects
Love
Brings
Life
Thou
Tiptoeing
Moment
Squander
Stuff
Dost
Away
Thief
Moments
Suspect
Made
Thieves

More quotes by John Updike

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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.
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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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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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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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It is not enough for a story to flow. It has to kind of trickle and glint as it crosses over the stones of the bare facts.
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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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I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.
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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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The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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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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What we need is progress with an escape hatch.
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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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Movies took you right up to the edge but kept you safe.
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I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.
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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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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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Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.
John Updike