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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.

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

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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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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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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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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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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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Our lives fade behind us before we die.
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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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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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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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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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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
John Updike