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"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."
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"They spent the first three years of school getting you to pretend stuff and then the rest of it marking you down if you did the same thing."

"This is what a real teacher does: she opens the gates of our minds to the possibilities of the soul."

"Since we cannot know all there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything."

"If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I'll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming 'Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?"

"It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written."

"Everything has changed. . . except the way we think. The aim [of education] must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals, who, however, see in the service of community their highest life problems."

"We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"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."

"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."

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."

"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."

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

"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."

"Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties."
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