John Updike Quotes
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Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.
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When she was a girl nobody had money but people had dreams.
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The great thing about the dead, they make space.
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You don’t stop caring, champ. You still care about that little girl whose underpants you saw in kindergarten. Once you care, you always care. That’s how stupid we are.
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Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth’s many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum.
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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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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?
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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.
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In the old movies, yes, there always was the happy ending and order was restored. As it is in Shakespeare's plays. It's no disgrace to, in the end, restore order. And punish the wicked and, in some way, reward the righteous.
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He could have gone over that night and faced the music but how much music is a man supposed to face?
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Family occasions have always given Janice some pain, assembling like a grim jury these people to whom we owe something, first our parents and elders and then our children and their children. One of the things she and Harry secretly had in common, beneath all their troubles, was dislike of all that, these expected ceremonies.
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The artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the 1950s but in the movies of the 1930s, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of their own immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.
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I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
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...he tries to view his life as a brick of sorts, set in place with a slap in 1933 and hardening ever since, just one life in rows and walls and blocks of lives.
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Women are actresses, tuning their part to each little audience.
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An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.
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The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea … the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices.
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Rabbit feels as if the human race is a vast colourful jostling bristling parade in which he is limping and falling behind.
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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.
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Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books.
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Harry, talking about the doctor who came to the ward and then went away. 'That guy has a thing about potato chips and hot dogs. If God didn't want us to eat salt and fat, why did He make them taste so good?'
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Re Florida Just not being senile is considered great down here.
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Nelson, re watching TV He watches until he feels his intelligence being too rudely insulted or his patience being too arrogantly tested by the commercials...