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"He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons."
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Exlpore more Disillusion quotes
"Do you think I am standing here, making this up as I go? I am sorry to disillusion you. I am not Robin Williams. I am the king of the pen."
"My emotions still held a stubborn hope that humans could be loyal, that they could hold out against the promise of an easy life. But I knew better."
"But he did not tell her, for he realised how petty it would appear to her, and how different from what she had expected, less sensational and less touching; he was afraid, too, lest, disillusioned in the matter of art, she might at the same time be disillusioned in the greater matter of love."
"Did you play by the rules and work hard but feel empty and unfulfilled? It's because you were lied to."
"He's like a hero come back from thewar, a poor maimed bastard living out the reality of his dreams.Wherever he sits himself the chair collapses; whatever door heenters the room is empty: whatever he puts in his mouth leaves abad taste. Everything is just the same as it was before; theelements are unchanged, the dream is no different than the reality.Only, between the time he went to sleep and the time he woke up,his body was stolen."
"Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep."
"When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy."
"So what are we given? We're also given, my generation, the disillusionment of our parents."
"I made a sorry face in response to such strong insistence, but I couldn't believe him. Fantasies were exactly that..fantasies. Whimsy. Wishes. Mere castles in the sky without foundation or substance. Dreams didn't come true. To believe so would be to believe falsely, to surrender to madness, to give in to an unreliable hope that would crush me once again as it always, always did!"
"He lost his appetite for reading. He was afraid of being overwhelmed again. In mystery novels people died like dolls being discarded; in science fiction enormities of space and time conspired to crush the humans ; and even in P.G. Wodehouse he felt a hollowness, a turning away from reality that was implicitly bitter, and became explicit in the comic figures of futile parsons."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"I was made to feel I could do things. If you get this feeling early and can hold it until you're 15, you tend to never lose it."
"In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent scream at the thought of future aeons -- at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me. The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise of the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience."
"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."
"The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods."
"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."
"The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature."
"The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist."
"I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser."
"The faith in an afterlife, however much our reason ridicules it, very modestly extends our faith that each moment of our consciousness will be followed by another - that a coherent matrix has been prepared for this precious self of ours. The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, of what we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified."
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