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There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals.

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
Mixed
Betrayal
Sacrifice
Loss
Betrayals
Happiness
Compounded
Thing
Losses
Static
Sacrifices

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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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From infancy on, we are all spies the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few.
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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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You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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Dream golf is simply golf played on another course. We chip from glass tables onto moving stairways we swing in a straightjacket, through masses of cobweb, and awaken not with any sense of unjust hazard but only with a regret that the round can never be completed, and that one of our phantasmal companions has kept the scorecard.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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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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The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.
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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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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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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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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.
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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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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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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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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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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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