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Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained.

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
Shadow
Darkness
Humanity
Pressed
Moving
Explained
Light
Moves
Everything
Define
Would
Casts
Spirituality

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I never made a decision in my life that wasn't one hundred per cent selfish.
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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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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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The first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones that watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand.
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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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Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
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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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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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One of the nice things about having a lover, it makes you think about everything anew. The rest of your life becomes a kind of movie, flat and even rather funny.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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In no other sport must the spectator move.
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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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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop the gut expanded to take in more and more.
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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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All those little congruences and arabesques you prepared with such delicate anticipatory pleasure are gobbled up as if by pigs at a pastry cart.
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The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.
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Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
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