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Exlpore more Paradox quotes

"Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever. I know where I came from-but where did all you zombies come from?I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once-and you all went away.So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.You aren't really there at all. There isn't anybody but me-Jane-here alone in the dark.I miss you dreadfully!"

"Being here with him is safety; it's a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside. This is a delusion, of course. This room is one of the most dangerous places I could be."

"It is woven with the most powerful paradoxes in the Nine Worlds - Wi-Fi with no lag, a politician's sincerity, a printer that prints, healthy deep fried food, and an interesting grammar lecture!''Okay, yeah,' I admitted. 'Those things don't exist."

"Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"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 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."

"Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flourishing sign of God's specifically American favor, made manifest in the uncountable millions of Carnegie and Mellon and Henry Ford and Catholina Lambert. But amid this fabled plenty the whiff of damnation had cleared of dollars and cents the parched ground around Clarence Wilmot."

"The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever."

"Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."

"The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all."

"In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity."
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