Quote

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.

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
Bird
Grieving
Year
Autumn
Shapely
Fall
Birds
Grieves
Hard
Stone
Flown
Years
Ghost
Maple
Leaves
Stripped
Stones
Departed
Ground
Ghosts

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I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
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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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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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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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President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips-can you imagine such crap in this day and age?
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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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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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What seems to sell books is good word-of-mouth, not promotion tours. I'm too old to believe that media promotion of a book really matters. What matters is how it will look 100 years from now, not how many copies are sold.
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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American art in general... takes to surreal exaggerations and metaphors but its Puritan work ethic has little use for the playful self-indulgence behind Parisian Surrealism.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.
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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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Hope bases vast premises on foolish accidents, and reads a word where in fact only a scribble exists.
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I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.
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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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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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