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"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism."
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Exlpore more Being quotes
"Great is the difference betwixt a man's being frightened at, and humbled for his sins."
"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."
"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."
"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions."
"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."
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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