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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.

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
Faith
Physical
Consumption
Reality
Asking
Aside
Self
Step
Realms
Selves
Trying
Exist
Precious
Sensation
Believe
Growth
Intention
Materialism
Good
Steps
Kept
Exclusive
Things
Emotion
Memory
Realm
Memories
Conscience
Sensations

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Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.
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Affairs, ... , like everything else, ask too much.
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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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The illusion is an agreement between the reader and writer that this [story] will be like life. The emotional temperature drops when you have footnotes.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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Yes, there is a ton of information on the web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile.
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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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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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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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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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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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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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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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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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Golf camaraderie, like that of astronauts and Antarctic explorers, is based on a common experience of transcendence fat or thin, scratch or duffer, we have been somerwhere together where non-golfers never go.
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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Life is a roller coaster, you have your ups and downs unless you fall off.
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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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