Quote

You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.

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
Sound
Wind
Volume
Life
Longer
Beneath
World
Dead
Stands
Side
Grass
Either
Wild
Volumes
Sides
Blind
Hears
Growing
Soon
Insects
Lying
Whose
Winds

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Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
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If you're telling me I'm not mature, that's one thing I don't cry over since as far as I can make out it's the same thing as being dead.
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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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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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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of. Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
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The muttered hint, Remember, you have a stroke here, freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.
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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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Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position.
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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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New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.
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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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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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The difference between a childhood and a boyhood must be this: our childhood is what we alone have had our boyhood is what any boy in our environment would have had.
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Do what the heart commands. The heart is our only guide.
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Why does one never hear of government funding for the preservation and encouragement of comic strips, girlie magazines and TV soap operas? Because these genres still hold the audience they were created to amuse and instruct.
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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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Days, pale slices between nights, they blend, not exactly alike, transparencies so lightly tinted that only stacked all together do they darken to a fatal shade.
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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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Life, just as we first thought, is playing grownup.
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