Quote

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?

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
Saying
Ingenuity
Humanity
Ambiguity
Happen
Atheist
Happened
Atheism
Universe
Intellectual
Happens
Among
Dead
Repulsion
Position
Drastic

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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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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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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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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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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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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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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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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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How can the planet keep turning and turning and not get so bored it explodes?
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The difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
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Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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