John Updike Quotes
-
re a woman on TV on 'Wheel of Fortune' She makes you proud to be a two-legged mammal.
-
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.
-
One of the satisfactions of fiction, or drama, or poetry from the perpetrator’s point of view is the selective order it imposes upon the confusion of a lived life; out of the daily welter of sensation and impression these few verbal artifacts, these narratives or poems, are salvaged and carefully presented.
-
These dysfunctionals make him aware of how functional he is.
-
Re Annabelle ...she is an old maid already. But the bright-eyed flounce with which she sits down and slides her way to the center of the table in the booth suggests that she is still hopeful, still a player in whatever the game is.
-
He had gone to church and brought back this little flame and had nowhere to put it on the dark damp walls of the apartment, so it had flickered and gone out. And he realised that he wouldn't always be able to produce this flame.
-
All men are boys time is trying to outsmart.
-
For male and female alike, the bodies of the other sex are messages signaling what we must do - they are glowing signifiers of our own necessities.
-
Hard to believe God is always listening, never gets bored.
-
'The past is the past,' Harry goes on, 'you got to live in the present. … It's the only way to think. When you're my age, you'll see it. At my age if you carried all the misery you've seen on your back you'd never get up in the morning.'
-
Once when Harry asked Ed why they didn't go back to Toledo, Ed looked at him with that smartass squint and asked, 'You ever been to Toledo?'
-
Ronnie to Nelson 'For a guy who snorted an entire car agency up his nose, you're one to talk about con games.'
-
To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.
-
at the hospital, Janice speaking to Dr Olman in Harry's presence in the ward 'What's wrong with his heart, exactly?' Janice asks.
-
He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.
-
Any decent kind of world, you wouldn't need all these rules.
-
Harry, to Nelson 'Don't forget, there's a Depression coming.'
-
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.
-
'...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.
-
Thelma '...We're too old to keep being foolish.'
-
'Driving is boring,' Rabbit pontificates, 'but it's what we do. Most of American life is driving somewhere and then driving back wondering why the hell you went.'
-
A woman you've endured such a gnawing of desire for, you can't help bearing a little grudge against, when the ache is gone.
-
When you feel irresistable, you're hard to resist.
-
about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.