John Updike Quotes

I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

John Updike

• Trying
• Father
• Laughter

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Quotes to Explore

• Yes, there is plenty of hard work for them in addition to that which they do when they appear, smiling and happy, when the curtain goes up. Giving a performance is the least of their worries.

  

  Florenz Ziegfeld
  • Up
  • Work
  • Happy

• What's interesting about Stephen Baldwin is that me and Dana Gould were originally cast for 'Bio-Dome' – but Pauly Shore and Baldwin ended up doing it. So there's a little movie trivia for ya.

  

  Harland Williams
  • Movie
  • Interesting
  • Ended

• In the governments, as we've witnessed in the past, they had to hide. Because there's a lot of concentration on the friends-and-family club... We're not about that. That's not the government of the future of the State of New York. What's gonna pull this state out of the doldrums that it's in right now is an honest and open government.

  

  Carl Paladino
  • Family
  • Friends
  • Future

• I used to be someone that needed nine hours of sleep; otherwise, I didn't think I was going to sound good when I sang, and I was very disciplined and anal about my preparation. When you become a parent, there just isn't that time, you know?

  

  Idina Menzel
  • Time
  • Good
  • Sleep

• The physician must give heed to the region in which the patient lives, that is to say, to its type and peculiarities.

  

  Paracelsus
  • Say
  • Give
  • Physician

• The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.

  

  Igor Stravinsky
  • More
  • Self
  • Execution

• You lay out a plan and - say a three-year plan or a two-year plan - and say, 'This is what we can do. We can do the transportation packages, like the highway bill and the water bill, and we can do some of these other areas - a farm bill - whatever it is, we lay out a schedule, and we put that committee to work to do that.'

  

  Dan Webster
  • Work
  • Water
  • Transportation

• With 'Mad Men,' people who grew up or were living in that time, they love to talk about what it was really like.

  

  Cara Buono
  • People
  • Time
  • Like

• In the South, there was absence of any leadership corresponding in breadth and courage to that of Abraham Lincoln.

  

  W. E. B. Du Bois
  • Courage
  • Leadership
  • South

• I think being called a cat lady is a compliment. It means you have adopted a tiny little maniac into your life.

  

  Hannah Simone
  • Life
  • Think
  • Cat

• A man cannot become an atheist merely by wishing it.

  

  Napoleon Bonaparte
  • Man
  • Become
  • Atheist

• When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

  

  Carl Friedrich Gauss
  • True
  • Something
  • Trivial

• I'm not gonna try to defend, or undo what's been done. All I could say about whatever's been done, it's been done, and it's water under the bridge. I have no regrets of my life.

  

  Ike Turner Ike & Tina Turner
  • Life
  • Done
  • Water

• I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

  

  P. J. Harvey
  • Up
  • Music
  • Growing

• When I first came to New York I was a dancer, and a French record label offered me a recording contract and I had to go to Paris to do it. So I went there and that's how I really got into the music business. But I didn't like what I was doing when I got there, so I left, and I never did a record there.

  

  Madonna Breakfast Club
  • Music
  • Business
  • New York

• True maturity is only reached when a man realizes he has become a father figure to his girlfriends' boyfriends - and he accepts it.

  

  Larry McMurtry
  • True
  • Father
  • Man

• There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present.

  

  Walter Salles
  • America
  • Present
  • Latin

• Cotton was a force of nature. There's a poetry to it, hoeing and growing cotton.

  

  B. B. King
  • Nature
  • Growing
  • Poetry

• Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

  

  Karl Marx
  • Time
  • Art
  • Same

• Juliana?” the words were low and far—too calm for her husband, who had found that he rather enjoyed the full spectrum of emotion now that he had experienced it. “Yes?” “What are you doing twenty feet in the air?” “Looking for a book.” “Would you mind very much returning to the earth?” “What are you thinking, climbing to the rafters in your condition?” “I am not an invalid, Simon, I still have use of all my extremes.” “You do indeed—particularly your extreme ability to try my patience—I believe, however, that you mean extremities.

  

  Sarah MacLean
  • Thinking
  • Trying
  • Earth

• I want to go to college if I can. That's really important to me, and I really hope that I get that opportunity to do so.

  

  Brynn Cartelli
  • Important
  • Hope
  • Opportunity

• Liberty in Islam is the liberty to be a Muslim, democracy likewise, individualism likewise.

  

  James Buchan
  • Democracy

• I miss only, and then only a little, in the late afternoon, the sudden white laughter that like heat lightning bursts in an atmosphere where souls are trying to serve the impossible. My father for all his mourning moved in the atmosphere of such laughter. He would have puzzled you. He puzzled me. His upper half was hidden from me, I knew best his legs.

  

  John Updike
  • Trying
  • Father
  • Laughter