John Updike Quotes
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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?
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'Who wants to fish, if you're halfway civilised? Dangling some dead meat in front of some poor brainless thing and then pulling him up by a hook in the roof of his mouth? Cruellest thing people do is fish.'
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He’s not that young, he’s turned twenty-three, and what makes him feel foolish among these people, he’s married. Nobody else here looks married. There is sure nobody else pregnant, that it shows. It makes him feel put on display, as a guy who didn’t know better.
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Annabelle '...health care is an expanding field, as the world fills up with people that would have been dead a hundred years ago. Everybody winds up needing care, pretty much.'
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Writers take words seriously - perhaps the last professional class that does - and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.
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Nelson, re. Annabelle ...'she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.'
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Judy, 8, is watching TV He tells Judy, 'Better pack it in, sweetie. Another big day tomorrow: we're going to go to the beach and sailing.' But his voice comes out listless, and perhaps that is the saddest loss time brings, the lessening of excitement about anything.
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Truth should not be forced; it should simply manifest itself, like a woman who has in her privacy reflected and coolly decided to bestow herself upon a certain man.
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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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But the fast lane too gets to be a rut.
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The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience.
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Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.
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Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
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'Well,' his father says, 'I'll say this for Slick Willie, he's brought the phrase out in the open. When I was young you had to explain to girls what it was. They could hardly believe they were supposed to do it.'
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Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
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Not his problem. Fewer and fewer things are.
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The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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Harry to Janice, about the financial situation '...You're in real trouble.'
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Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism. One knows only that he has passed into it and lives beyond us, in a condition not ours.
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God's country. He could have made it smaller and still made the same point.
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Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't.
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Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.
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'...Nelson'll be thirty-three in a couple of months.' He thinks it would be a waste of breath, and maybe offensive, to explain to Mr Shimada that at that same age Jesus Christ was old enough to be crucified and redeem mankind.
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I must go to Nature disarmed of perspective and stretch myself like a large transparent canvas upon her in the hope that, my submission being perfect, the imprint of a beautiful and useful truth would be taken.