“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?”
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 4
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John Updike 240
American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, an… 1932–2009Related quotes
“So, now that we’re dead, what’s our next move?”
Gale (p. 289)
The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)
“My plan: we’re gonna crush the virus very quickly. It’s happening already. It’s happening.”
2020, October 2020
“We’re not just dealing in willingness. Humanity has to qualify to survive.”
From 1980s onwards, Norie Huddle interview (1981)
Context: We’re not just dealing in willingness. Humanity has to qualify to survive. You have to have some confidence. We’re all born naked, with no external equipment and no experience. Therefore we’re terribly ignorant. We’re hungry and thirsy, driven to find food by trial and error. So we’re designed to live by trial and error. Don’t worry about making mistakes. Study your mistakes; admit them, study them, and be terribly excited about them too. If this isn’t true, what is true?
Source: The Falling Woman (1986), Chapter 6 (p. 84)
Source: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard (2015), Chapter 24, “Dead to Dead” (pp. 230-231)
Estoy solo entre materias desvencijadas,
la lluvia cae sobre mí, y se me parece,
se me parece con su desvarío,solitaria en el mundo muerto,
rechazada al caer, y sin forma obstinada.
Débil del Alba (Weak with the Dawn or The Dawn's Debility), Residencia I (Residence I), I, stanza 5.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
I am alone among rickety substances,
the rain falls upon me and it seems like me,
like me with its madness, alone in the dead world,
rejected as it falls, and without persistent shape.
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)
As quoted in "The Gentle Philosopher" (2006) by John Little at the Will Durant Foundation https://web.archive.org/web/20130312115951/http://www.willdurant.com/home.html
Context: It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.