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"Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience."
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Exlpore more Experience quotes
"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."
"Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?"
"All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it."
"Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation."
"Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work."
"Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience."
"Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around."
"With action experience grows, with travel outlooks grow, and with reflections wisdom grows."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"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."
"There is no such thing as static happiness. Happiness is a mixed thing, a thing compounded of sacrifices, and losses, and betrayals."
"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."
"No matter how cheerful and blameless the day's activities have been, when you wake in the middle of the night there is guilt in the air, a gnawing feeling of everything being slightly off, wrong - you in the wrong, and the world too, as if darkness is a kind of light that shows us the depth we are about to fall into."
"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."
"My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy."
"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."
"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds."
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