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I would especially like to re-court the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.

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
Like
Ran
Court
Poetry
Scribbled
Especially
Mailman
Four
Postcard
Years
Postcards
Would
Drops
Time
Muse

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Mozart's music gives us permission to live.
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Nothing seems to matter quite as much. I no longer think about death in the concentrated way I once did. I don't know? you get so old and you sort of give up in some way. You've had your period of angst, your period of religious desperation, and you've arrived at a philosophical position where you don't need, or you can't bear, to look at it.
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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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School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
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Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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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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There's always something new by looking at the same thing over and over.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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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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Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.
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A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.
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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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The fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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Hemingway describes literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other.
John Updike
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Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic un-interestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we're dead we're dead?
John Updike
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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The first breath of adultery is the freest after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
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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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