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John Updike Quotes about Reality

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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.

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.

John Updike
Dream, Reality, Men
"Why Updike delved into suicide killers' psyches", www.today.com. June 28, 2006.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

John Updike
Hurt, Eye, Reality
1989 Self-Consciousness, I.'A Soft Spring Night in Shillington'.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. 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. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

John Updike
Dream, Pain, Reality
Source: www.today.com

...as all souls are equal before their Maker, a two inch putt counts the same as a 250 yard drive. There is a comedy in this and a certain unfairness even, which makes golf an even apter mirror of reality.

John Updike
Golf, Reality, Mirrors

My only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me-to give the mundane its beautiful due.

John Updike
Beautiful, Reality, Giving
John Updike (2015). “Selected Poems”, p.17, Knopf

When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept - the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

John Updike
Memories, Believe, Reality
John Updike (2012). “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs”, p.250, Random House

The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.

John Updike
Reality, Self, Guarantees That
John Updike (1989). “Self-consciousness: memoirs”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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