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"Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop, the gut expanded to take in more and more."
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"Be confidently assured that any 'gods' that we build will always have veracious appetites, and sooner or later they will gorge themselves on that which built them."
"The temptation to spend money increases as a person's opportunities increase."
"Opportunity may only knock once, but temptation'll knock down the damn door and drag you out by the hair."
"Pleasure, in itself harmless, may become mischievous, by endearing to us a state which we know to be transient and probatory, and withdrawing our thoughts from that of which every hour brings us nearer to the beginning, and of which no length of time will bring us to the end. Mortification is not virtuous in itself, nor has any other use, but that it disengages us from the allurements of sense. In the state of future perfection, to which we all aspire, there will be pleasure without danger, and security without restraint."
"Every sexual sin begins with flattery."
"The word lust can mean "selfish desire". . . .It is wanting something so badly you will do anything to get it. That is one of the tricks of the devil. It is too high a price to pay."
"To use a man for what he is naturally best fitted is to keep him, if one can, from apostasy and dissatisfaction. At the same time, life's temptations come most often from that for which one has the greatest aptitude."
"If God offers the world for sale, how much will you pay for it? What is the price of your own destruction?"
"Everything Satan has to offer you is a collection of what Jesus rejected, it is the garbage bin of Jesus Christ. Matthew 4:1-17."
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"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."
"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas."
"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."
"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."
"She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted ..."
"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."
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