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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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"Temptation is stronger in the minds of people who are in doubt. Prayer makes it weaker."

"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."

"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."

"You oughtn't to yield to temptation. Well, somebody must, or the thing becomes absurd."

"As I stare at it,I can feel little invisible strings,silently tugging me toward it. I have to touch it. I have to wear it. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

"Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."

"The Dragon King's gaze turned to her. Darcy watched him standing in the glow of the streetlight, completely mesmerized by the dragon tat that ran from the King's right shoulder, under his armpit, and down his side to the top of his right thigh. The dragon's head was at the front of the man's shoulder and had his mouth open as if on a roar. He was rearing with his wings up and out. It was his long tail that stopped at the King's thigh. The King glistened with sweat that made his muscles gleam in the light. Darcy had the absurd notion to run her hands all over his body, learning the feel of his hard muscles and warm skin."

"We're all going to be victims of temptation at several points in our lives."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone."

"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."

"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."

"A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience."

"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."

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"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."

"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 ..."
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