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Exlpore more Wonder quotes

"Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story."

"The moment of existence is miraculous."

"Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?"

"O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! And yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."

"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."

"As long as Nelson was socked into baseball statistics or that guitar or even the rock records that threaded their sound through all the fibers of the house, his occupation of the room down the hall was no more uncomfortable than the persistence of Rabbit's own childhood in an annex of his brain; but when the stuff with hormones and girls and cars and beers began, Harry wanted out of fatherhood."

"Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea."
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