“What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Leadership
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“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.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sports
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“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as an intellectual position. Where was the ingenuity, the ambiguity, the humanity (in the Harvard sense) of saying that the universe just happened to happen and that when we’re dead we’re dead?”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Atheism
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“Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided tobestow herself upon a certain man.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Truth
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“Sex is like money; only too much is enough.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Perfection
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“By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it cost them.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: General
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“Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Nudity
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“Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Innocence
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“I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Political
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“Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.”
John Updike
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Age
