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" A seventeenth-century house can be recognized by its steep roof, massive central chimney and utter porchlessness. Some of those houses have a second-story overhang, emphasizing their medieval look. "

John Updike

Look

Houses

Chimney

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John Updike

Dull

Person

" The rich - they just live in another realm, really. "

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" I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel. "

John Updike

Limits

Writing

" Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. "

" All love comes from the family. "

John Updike

Family

Love

" Existence itself does not feel horrible; it feels like an ecstasy, rather, which we have only to be still to experience. "

John Updike

Existence

Experience

" My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know. "

" Most Americans haven't had my happy experience of living for thirteen years in a seventeenth-century house, since most of America lacks seventeenth-century houses. "

" Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one. "

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