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

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Baseball is meant to be fun, and not all the solemn money-men in fur-collared greatcoats, not all the scruffy media cameramen and sour-faced reporters that crowd around the dugouts can quite smother the exhilarating spaciousness and grace of this impudently relaxed sport, a game of innumerable potential redemptions and curious disappointments.
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Revolution is just one crowd taking power from another.
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There was clearly great charm and worth in a sport so quaintly perverse in its basic instructions. Hit down to make the ball rise. Swing easy to make it go far. Finish high to make it go straight.
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Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance?
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Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
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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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Of nothing but me I sing, lacking another song.
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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.
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Human was the music, natural was the static.
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I did feel as though a number of critics had appointed themselves, when they sat down with a new book of mine, to rectify what they felt to be was my inflated reputation and so that the book in hand was not really given a chance but made a kind of weapon in the general attempt to bring me down to size.
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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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I'm not against TV I don't go on the morning talk shows because I'm not invited. If I was, I might go.
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The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.
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Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.
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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 first breathe of adultery is the freest.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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One does not go to Moscow to get fat.
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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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There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.
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