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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.

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
Selfish
Intervals
Opposite
Afterlife
Opposites
Yearning
Praise
Privileged
Experience
Immortality
Light
Complexes
Love
Complex
World
Witness
Interval

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There is the fear that you somehow neglected to say what was really yours to say.
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The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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The stripped and shapely Maple grieves The ghosts of her Departed leaves. The ground is hard, As hard as stone. The year is old, The birds are flown.
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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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All love is betrayal, in that it flatters life. The loveless man is best armed.
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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
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As I get older, my childhood self becomes more accessible to me, but selectively, in images as stylized and suspect as moments remembered from a novel read years ago.
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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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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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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.
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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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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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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.
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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?
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