Quote

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.

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
Air
Pebbles
Catapult
High
Alleys
Keds
Voice
Snaps
Catapults
Seems
Wire
Moist
Loose
Scrape
Voices
Wires
March
Alley
Blue
Snap

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Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
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Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
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It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
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Within your own generation-the same songs, the same wars, the same attitudes toward those wars, the same rules and radio shows in the air-you can gauge the possibilities and impossibilities. With a person of another generation, you are treading water, playing with fire.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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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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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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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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But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.
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The literary scene is a kind of Medusa’s raft, small and sinking, and one’s instinct when a newcomer tries to clamber aboard is to step on his fingers.
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My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.
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Journalism has not only its social stimulations but its aesthetic virtues. An invitation into print, from however suspect a source, is an opportunity to make something beautiful, to discover within oneself a treasure that would otherwise have remained buried.
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irony is a way of having one's cake while appearing to eat it.
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But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.
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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.
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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 difficulty is, all swing thoughts decay, like radium. What burnt up the course on Wednesday has turned to lead on Sunday. Yet it does not do to have a blank mind: the terrible hugeness of the course will rush into the vacuum and the ball will spray like a thing berserk.
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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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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.
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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.
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