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"Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us."
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"A child's best friend is often the one telling bedtime stories."

"A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers."

"To see persons looking with children's eyes at any ordinary scenery, is a proof that they possess the charming faculty of drawing new sensations from an old experience..."

"You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was."

"When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you'll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone's arms, as a story was spun around you like a web."

"No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"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."

"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."

"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."

"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."
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