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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.

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
Cart
Carts
Pigs
Delicate
Gobbled
Prepared
Anticipatory
Pleasure
Congruence
Littles
Pastry
Little
Pastries

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There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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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 fact that we still live well cannot ease the feeling that we no longer live nobly.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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The throat: how strange, that there is not more erotic emphasis upon it. For here, through this compound pulsing pillar, our life makes its leap into spirit, and in the other direction gulps down what it needs of the material world.
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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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It's not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.
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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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If you look at the best-seller list, it is mostly thrillers. Very few books attempt to create an image of the life we live. I knew there were writers who wore tweed coats and lived in Connecticut and somehow made a living, and that's what I aimed to do. I've tried to write as well as I can with books that say something to any reader.
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Adversity in immunological doses has its uses more than that crushes.
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There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
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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.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance perversity is the souls very life.
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Art imitates Nature in this not to dare is to dwindle.
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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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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.
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