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"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."
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"What is there so fearful as the expectation of evil tidings delayed? ... Misery is a more welcome visitant when she comes in her darkest guise and wraps us in perpetual black, for then the heart no longer sickens with disappointed hope.- The Evil Eye."
"What are you working on?' Elizabeth asked. Nate could hear her tapping a pencil on her desk. She took notes during their conversations. He didn't know what she did with the notes, but it bothered him.'I have a lecture at the sanctuary in four days.' Why, why had he told her? Why? Now she'd rattle down the mountain in her ancient Mercedes that looked like a Nazi staff car, sit in the audience, and ask all the questions that she knew in advance he couldn't answer."
"I've never felt so bereft and panicky. What do I do without my phone? How do I function? My hand keeps automatically reaching for my phone in its usual place in my pocket. Every instinct in me wants to text someone, 'OMG, I've lost my phone! ' but how can do that without a bloody phone?"
"How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing."
"He smiled. A sub shouldn't be terrified, but a little anxiety was good."
"In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagines past."
"There's an insecure part of me that comes out of me, I get nervous. I don't know why, I wish I could overcome it because it gives me an anxiety feeling."
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."
"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."
"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."
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