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"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't-whichever seems likelier to win an effect."
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"Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual."

"Unless you stop him. Perhaps next we meet.""You'll be just as annoying?" I guessed.He fixed my with those warm brown eyes. "Or perhaps you could bring me up to speed on those modern courtship rituals."I sat there stunned until he gave me a glimpse of a smile-just enough to let me know he was teasing. Then he disappeared."Oh, very funny!" I yelled."

"The Fool held his breath. On long nights on the hard flagstones he had dreamed of women like her. Although, if he really thought about it, not much like her; they were better endowed around the chest, their noses weren't so red and pointed, and their hair tended to flow more. But the Fool's libido was bright enough to tell the difference between the impossible and the conceivably attainable, and hurriedly cut in some filter circuits."

"D'yer see it? This finger, laddie, could send ye to meet yer Maker!Sgt. Deisenburger stared at the black and purple nail a few inches from his face. As an offensive weapon it rated quite highly, especially if it was ever used in the preparation of food."

"Showing off is more ridiculous in instances where the thing that is being shown off was bought on credit."

"It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating," said the Queen presently. "What would you like best to eat?""Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty," said Edmund."

"Hey, guard! Ian hollered out loud. "Do you think we could get a bathroom break? The guard seemed to snicker as he pointed to the grass outside the cell. Eena smirked at how dead-on her thoughts had been after all. "Come on, Ian complained. "She can't do that, she's a girl. The soldier smiled wryly, a shrug communicating his indifference. Eena laughed in her mind. (I don't know what you think's so funny. You're the one who's gotta pee.) Oddly enough, that fact just made her laugh even more."

"I HAVE MADE THIS FOR YOU. She reached out and took a damp square of cardboard. Water dripped off the bottom. Somewhere in the middle, a few brown feathers seemed to have been glued on. 'Thank you. Er ... what is it?'ALBERT SAID THERE OUGHT TO BE SNOW ON IT, BUT IT APPEARS TO HAVE MELTED, said Death. IT IS, OF COURSE, A HOGSWATCH CARD.'Oh ...' THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN A ROBIN ON IT AS WELL, BUT I HAD CONSIDERABLE DIFFICULTY IN GETTING IT TO STAY ON. 'Ah...'IT WAS NOT AT ALL COOPERATIVE.'Really ...?'IT DID NOT SEEM TO GET INTO THE HOGSWATCH SPIRIT AT ALL."

"I used to think that size does not count, until I realized that most people either find other people's faeces more disgusting than a bird's droppings, or they do not find the latter disgusting at all."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"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."

"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."

"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."

"The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions pour in upon the jittery spirit. Falling asleep is a study in trust. Likewise, religion tries to put as ease with the world. Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises-a mother speaking downstairs. We need the little clicks and sighs of a sustaining otherness. We need the gods."

"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."

"The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they're a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature."

"The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist."

"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."
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