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"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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"There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there."
"Deep down I believe each of us is a well-spring of understanding and wisdom, but we simply never allow the space or time for this understanding to rise to the level of conscious thought."
"There is an undeniable truth that as one progresses further in his understanding of a craft the rest of his life progresses along with it. This symbiotic relationship between all things is experienced on a daily basis, but rarely articulated through conscious thought."
"Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects."
"One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better."
"Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?"
Explore more quotes by John Updike
"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."
"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."
"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."
"Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties."
"We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe."
"In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value. The numb misery of the horse was matched by that of the farmer; the once-green ferny lives crushed into coal's fossiliferous strata were no more anonymous and obliterated than Clarence's own life would soon be, in a wink of earth's tremendous time. Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sherry horrible and disgusting. All fleshy acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy--the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem."
"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."
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