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Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them.

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
Men
Plant
Ghosts
Constant
Printing
Four
Emerge
Light
Sharp
Indoor
Littles
Pale
Blinking
Look
Ghost
Outdoor
Little
Instant
Overcomes
Looks
Overcoming
Clinging

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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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Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
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A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the 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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Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.
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We are cruel enough without meaning to be.
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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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We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.
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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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Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
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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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You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
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Our tears fatten upon our memories of joy.
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