John Updike Quotes
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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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'...This is a hideous thing. None of us will ever be the same.'
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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’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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Nelson, re. Annabelle ...'she wants what everybody wants. She wants love.'
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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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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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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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Charlie asks her for a Perrier with lime. She says that San Pellegrino is what they have. He says it's all the same to him. Fancy water is fancy water.
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Life is a hill that gets steeper the more you climb.
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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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Your children's losing battle with time seems even sadder than your own.
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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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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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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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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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The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
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...a sense of defeat the years have brought back to him, after what seemed for a while to be triumphs.
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Re Florida Just not being senile is considered great down here.
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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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When you're retired, you get into your routines and other people, even so-called loved ones, become a strain.
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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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'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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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.'