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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.

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
Sense
Embarrassed
Make
Miracle
Hour
Unthinkable
Seek
Lest
Beauty
Awakened
Hours
Convenience
Less
Monstrous
Christian
Crushed

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A photograph presents itself not only as a visual representation, but as evidence, more convincing than a painting because of the unimpeachable mechanical means whereby it was made. We do not trust the artist's flattering hand but we do trust film, and shadows, and light.
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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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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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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.
John Updike
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To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client.
John Updike
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Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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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 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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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
John Updike
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I'm somewhat shy about the brutal facts of being a carnivore. I don't like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburger and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.
John Updike
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
John Updike
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
John Updike
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
John Updike
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
John Updike
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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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We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
John Updike
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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