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"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism."
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"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."

"You can watch any episode you want and have a compelling story being told."

"Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light."

"Gentlemen, we are being killed on the beaches. Lets go inland and be killed."

"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The difficulty with humourists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"What I'm going to do is pry every stinking tag off these f.ing chairs and make a f.ing collar and throw that cat right in Connor's puked-up face. Pale turd."

"To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man."

"The difficulty with humorists is that they will mix what they believe with what they don't-whichever seems likelier to win an effect."

"TV families and your own are hard to tell apart, except your isn't interrupted every six minutes by commercials and theirs don't get bogged down into nothingness, a state where nothing happens, no skit, no zany visitors, no outburst on the laugh track, nothing at all but boredom and a lost feeling, especially when you get up in the morning and the moon is still shining and men are making noisy bets on the first tee."
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