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" As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses. "
John Updike
Twice
Think
Broken
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" Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever. "
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" I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest. "
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" New York, like the Soviet Union, has this universal usefulness: It makes you glad you live elsewhere. "
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" 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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" By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved. "
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" What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. "
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" Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a peasant. Of a teacher and a learner. "
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" In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a different grip. "
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" By the mid-17th century, telescopes had improved enough to make visible the seasonally growing and shrinking polar ice caps on Mars, and features such as Syrtis Major, a dark patch thought to be a shallow sea. "
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" Somehow, it is hard to dislike a man once you have played a round of golf with him. "
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" Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. "
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" The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. "
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" It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation. "
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" Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. "
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" But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography. "
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" Reagan has turned America into a tax haven. "
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" From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. "
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" We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. "
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" 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. "
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" All love comes from the family. "
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" Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides. "
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" Mars has long exerted a pull on the human imagination. The erratically moving red star in the sky was seen as sinister or violent by the ancients: The Greeks identified it with Ares, the god of war; the Babylonians named it after Nergal, god of the underworld. To the ancient Chinese, it was Ying-huo, the fire planet. "
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