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The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.

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
Therefore
Viewed
Equal
Scarcely
American
Constitutional
Self
Agony
Believe
Atheist
Flagellation
Men
Obligation
Intelligible
Like
Saint
Englishman
Created
Englishmen

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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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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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Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives and have stuck with them longer.
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
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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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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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Nothing feels worse than other people's good times.
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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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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.
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It is easy to love people in memory the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.
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The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.
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The other sad truth about golf spectatorship is that for today's pros it all comes down to the putting, and that the difference between a putt that drops and one that rims the cup, though teleologically enormous, is intellectually negligeable.
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The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.
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You write because you don't talk very well, and maybe one of the reasons that I was determined to write was that I wasn't an orator, unlike my mother and my grandfather, who both spoke beautifully and spoke all the time. Maybe I grew up with too many voices around me, as a matter of fact.
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There is always a chance of failure, of producing something totally unnecessary. But I guess that chance of failure is what makes tightrope walking, race-car driving.
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Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.
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The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.
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