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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.

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
Moving
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Perversity
Prefers
Soul
Circumstance
Heart
Grain
Life
Souls
Circumstances
Move

More quotes by John Updike

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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens as we get older we are exempted from more and more.
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We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.
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In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature.
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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
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You imagine a reader and try to keep the reader interested. That's storytelling. You also hope to reward the reader with a sense of a completed design, that somebody is in charge, and that while life is pointless, the book isn't pointless. The author knows where he is going. That's form.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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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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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.
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Families, doing everything for each other out of imagined obligation and always getting in each other's way, what a tangle.
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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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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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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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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.
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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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An American in London...cannot but be impressed and charmed by the city. The momumentality of Washington, the thriving business of New York, the antique intimacy of Boston, plus a certain spacious and open feeling reminiscent of Denver and San Francisco-all these he finds combined for his pleasure.
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Musicians are very mysterious and wonderful people to me I don't know how they do it.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?
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