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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.

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
Chains
Chaos
Devil
Order
Body

More quotes by John Updike

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By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.
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All men are mortal, and therefore all men are losers our profoundest loyalty goes out to the failed.
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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end.
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Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless we do not imagine, we view.
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To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.
John Updike
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Basically it's true that my own life has been my chief window for life in America, beginning with my childhood and the conflicts, the struggles, the strains that I felt in my own family.
John Updike
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Having children is something we think we ought to do because our parents did it, but when it is over the children are just other members of the human race, rather disappointingly.
John Updike
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Life is a razor, you are always in hot water or a scrape.
John Updike
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How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.
John Updike
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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 difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
John Updike
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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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The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.
John Updike
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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.
John Updike
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The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze.
John Updike
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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
John Updike